Deloitte's 2010 global industry analyst event highlighted the firm's size and global reach, its unique market position, and its direction for future growth. Enterprises seeking business and IT advisory and implementation services should consider Deloitte's breadth of capabilities, particularly for complex, multidomestic needs.

• With $26.6 billion in revenue for the year ended 31 May 2010 and roughly 170,000 employees, Deloitte is the largest privately held professional services firm in the world; the advisory service segment, including consulting, is Deloitte's largest service line, accounting for 60% of its revenue.

• Deloitte is investing ahead of the curve in terms of analytics offerings that span front- and back-office needs.

• Deloitte is renewing its focus on application management services.

For enterprises:

• Prospective clients of Deloitte should investigate whether the size and scope of Deloitte's integrated capabilities in Audit and Enterprise Risk, Tax, Financial Advisory, and Consulting (including Technology) offer an advantage to solving business problems as compared with competitive offerings.

• Current clients should explore how Deloitte can embed its analytics capability in current and planned engagements to derive fact-based recommendations.

• New and existing clients should explore Deloitte's new offerings — such as Application Management Services, cloud computing, cybersecurity and sustainability — to see if they offer a good fit.

Deloitte's combination of Audit and Enterprise Risk, Tax, Financial Advisory, and Consulting (including Technology) services demonstrates a unique mix of breadth and relative depth of capabilities, highlighted by the company's ability to integrate across service lines and geographies while maintaining its member firm structure. The recent launch of its "As One" strategy picks up on familiar threads of previous efforts by navigating around inhibitors that previously limited the firm's ability to capitalize on its approach.

At its annual analyst event on 5 October 2010, Deloitte announced that it is now the largest privately held professional services firm, that it is making a major push in analytics and application management services, and that it is investing in new business models.

Deloitte is clearly relishing its unique position in the business and IT services market, and the tone of the event was one that embraced innovation and risk taking more than usual. The most-interesting take-aways are as follows:

• That an IT-enabled capability, analytics, will now be front and center as both a stand-alone offering and an embedded one in all Deloitte consulting and advisory work.

• That we can expect business models beyond the billable hour start to take hold as analytics platforms and other leverageable practices are embraced by Deloitte's most-senior partners and most-traditional practices.

Deloitte's five strategic priorities in Technology Services to ensure its competitiveness, growth and differentiation are as follows:

• Focus on an addressable market that aligns to its overall brand. These are finance transformation and responsive finance, cybersecurity, analytics, and IT for sustainability.

• Reduce cost of service delivery to support growth paths and enhance technology offerings across all practices. To this end, Deloitte is investing some $250 million in global delivery and opening a new delivery center in China in 2011.

• Invest in and support key emerging countries. Emerging countries are key to growth. Deloitte is investing in its member firms in key strategic emerging countries, as a departure to the networked member firm model, in an effort to increase its ability to support clients globally.

• Focus on quality of service delivery and overall client interaction.

• Grow Technology Advisory Services (TAS). Continued strength in TAS is critical to being a trusted advisor to the CIO as well as in growing downstream work.

Gartner believes these areas will be critical for Deloitte's success in the coming 12 months:

• Sales and marketing must clearly articulate Deloitte's differentiation in analytics services, or risk getting lumped in with lower-cost IT services players. While there is much noise coming from all manner of vendors repositioning themselves as being in the analytics business, Deloitte has a strong value proposition. Its strength is not so much in analytics per se but in using analytics to solve a business problem, and then being able to help the client execute in line with recommendations. The ability to use all types of analytics — its own proprietary engines, packaged business intelligence software, internal/external data, etc. — to perform an analytics-based or fact-based advisory that leads to actionable recommendations that clients can use to solve a business problem is in high demand and naturally draws on Deloitte's heritage in consulting and audit. While this can be a differentiating message in the long run, near term, Deloitte's approach has to meet buyers where they are today. Key for Deloitte will be its ability to help its clients execute, decide and act on the company's analytics findings.

• More-aggressive moves into nonlinear revenue models. While Deloitte recognizes and is investing in offerings that are more-standardized and repeatable, it is behind some of its non-Big Four competitors in developing and broadcasting its nonlinear revenue offerings, such as software as a service and business utilities. Its move into the nonlinear world is made more difficult due to its branding and business model: high-end traditional management consultant. That said, we expect the firmwide investment in analytics services to yield some interesting new capabilities and knowledge-process-outsourcing-like offerings within the next year.

• Scaling up its Application Management Services (AMS). While its AMS offering has gained traction, garnering 30 new clients in 2009, it is starting from a small base. AMS is a volume game; the ability to scale up profitability while being cost-competitive is key to success. Deloitte needs to vet carefully how it grows this business, however, as pricing here can be brutal, and the space is increasingly dominated by offshore service providers.

• Beefing up business and IT consulting offerings beyond traditional strengths in finance, human resources, customer management, and mergers and acquisitions. To successfully compete with management consultancies on the one hand, and Accenture, IBM and India Inc. on the other hand, Deloitte must grow its qualifications in manufacturing and supply chain operations, along with supporting IT strategies, across product industries. Combining this expertise — finance, regulatory and tax expertise —with emerging markets will keep it out in front of its Big Four competitors.