KPMG, Microsoft Expand Tie-Up With Analytics, Cloud Offerings

KPMG and Microsoft plan to expand their existing partnership to jointly deliver new suites of software and services addressing data analytics, cloud services and business software.

The companies said the new collaboration is aimed at addresing challenges including the use of the cloud to unify customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and analytics services, while maintaining regulatory and compliance requirements.

Challenging environment

“KPMG’s deep experience in global business transformation combined with Microsoft Azure, SQL Server, Power BI and Dynamics will help our mutual customers compete in today’s mobile first, cloud first world,” said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise, in a statement.

KPMG said the collaboration is aimed at helping companies use new technologies to face their business transformation challenges.

“The real point of difference in this collaboration is our ability to set new standards for innovative business solutions, enabled by Microsoft’s leading platform and application suite, delivered rapidly to market to create real business value,” stated Mark Goodburn, KPMG’s global head of advisory.

In the data and analytics area, the companies said they are developing a new, integrated data and analytics platform, which will be used alongside Microsoft’s existing tools, both in the cloud and in customers’ existing environments.

Compliance

For cloud compliance and transformation, the companies are to provide new offerings including hybrid cloud technologies from Microsoft and expertise in compliance and change management from KPMG, with the aim of helping companies adapt to a business environment focused on cloud services.

In the third area, business solutions, the companies said they plan to use Microsoft’s Dynamics ERP and CRM offerings as the basis for new industry-specific offerings to be developed by KPMG.

In a recent report on business use of the cloud, KPMG found that 49 percent of the companies surveyed had used cloud technologies to lower costs, with 42 percent using it to enable a mobile workforce, 37 percent to improve relations with customers and partners, and 35 percent to better leverage data to arrive at business insights.

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