[eitally]

I was in Google's partner org for 8 years and recently joined a cloud services company, but one that specialized in product engineering rather than "normal" system integration work. I've found that there's a glut of traditional SI partners, all of whom promise the latest & greatest tech, the most skilled technicians, and the highest CSAT. If you don't know the space, you'd be forgiven for assuming they're all roughly equivalent, but that's not remotely true.

There is a glut of outsourcing shops but there's also a wide gamut of specialization, and it can be difficult to choose the right partner for a given job. Some areas are far more commoditized than others (general cloud migration or general systems administration or general appdev, vs data analytics platforms for specific industry use cases, building regulatory compliant stuff, doing BPO in spaces that require deep domain knowledge, etc. I would never trust Accenture to do product engineering, and I would never trust [insert small generalist SI here] to do business strategy consulting. But even those aren't hard & fast rules.

Consulting and outsourcing shops exist for a reason, and those reasons aren't going away. The market is huge, and although there's been a dip over the past year with the Ukraine war and global macro-economic challenges, everyone expects things to recover and most of the big consultancies have been using this time to both "right size" and refocus to ensure they're ready to help companies of all sizes reach their growth ambitions.