Who Are the Worldwide Microsoft Implementation Services Leaders?
Determining the best Microsoft partners in the world is challenging. With a community as large, diverse and global as the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN), there are a thousand ways to look at the question.
Market research firm IDC took a crack at it from the standpoint of global implementation giants in a report released last month. The "IDC Marketscape: Worldwide Microsoft Implementation Services 2019 Vendor Assessment" is an analysis of 10 Microsoft systems integrators.
To be included, a firm had to have at least $125 million of revenue from a Microsoft implementation practice at a worldwide level, a minimum of 1,000 professionals related to Microsoft projects, and at least 10 percent of revenue and 10 percent of headcount in each of IDC's three macroregions.
Summarizing its findings in the form of a chart, IDC was careful not to rank the top 10. Instead, citing 34 evaluation criteria, IDC arranged the companies along a two-axis chart with "Capabilities" on the vertical axis and "Strategies" on the horizontal. Five companies are clustered around the lower edge of a "Leaders" category and the other five are clustered near the top of a "Major Players" category.
According to IDC, the leaders include Accenture and Avanade (grouped as one entity), IBM, Infosys, HCL and TCS. The major players are PwC, DXC, EY, Wipro and Cognizant.
IDC noted that although Leidos is one of the top five systems integrators based on worldwide revenue, the firm was excluded due to the concentration of its revenue. According to IDC, Leidos typically receives more than 80 percent of its revenues from the U.S. government.
IDC also cautioned that its evaluation should not be considered a "final judgment" on firms to consider for a project. "It is conceivable, and in fact the case, that specialty firms can compete with multidisciplinary firms on an equal footing," analyst Ali Zaidi wrote in the report.
In short, the IDC research provides a useful snapshot of the biggest and broadest systems integrators in the Microsoft ecosystem.
An excerpt of the report featuring Accenture and Avanade is available here.
Posted by Scott Bekker on June 17, 2019