Big 4 Consulting Firms, Golfers & Changing Landscape

In my Friday midnight flight read the WSJ and spotted two prominent ads by Accenture & BearingPoint – as was the trend in the recent past, both ads featured golf champions. BearingPoint was congratulating Phil Mickelson on his victory in the Masters in Augusta: the intended message – Bearingpoint’s consultants provide their clients such top level of service and expertise. Accenture features Tiger Woods in their "Go on. Be a Tiger" series and their consultants helping their clients become a High Performance Business.Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods are the No.1 & No.2 players earnings wise respectively. While it is debatable on the effectiveness of personality centric advertisements coming from consulting companies and associate leading golfers with that. It is interesting to see that BearingPoint has aligned with the No.1 player. We know that the golf ratings can slip very fast and may be the consulting industry is talking about the fast changing realities. With the changing landscape,it makes an interesting reading though. Contracts are getting shorter and work is being spread across multiple providers, and large outsourcing contracts signed in the 1990s are coming up for re-bidding. Look at this impending changes in outsourcing in 2005. In essence what this means is that the global industry is beginning to see industry consolidation and leadership changes, among other things and is on the verge of restructuring, resulting in a redistribution of wealth across the entire spectrum of suppliers, buyers and investors.