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Andy Baldwin, the British consulting executive who lost the race to become global boss of EY, has joined IBM in another example of the US technology group recruiting a senior figure from the Big Four.
Baldwin, an architect of EY’s unsuccessful attempt to spin off its advisory arm, will become general managing partner at IBM Consulting, the company announced on Monday.
The role puts him in charge of growth and service offerings at a big EY competitor, a year and a half after he came in second place to become global chief executive of the Big Four firm.
It marks a return to a company where Baldwin, 58, worked for two years in the early 2000s and opens an additional chapter in a more than 30-year consulting career that was otherwise spent mainly at EY.
As global managing partner for client service for five years until last summer, he was a driving force behind Project Everest, the plan to spin off EY’s consulting business. He argued it was necessary to free EY from conflict of interest rules that severely limit the work it can do with big technology companies, many of which are EY audit clients.
Infighting put paid to the plan, however, and Baldwin went from being favourite to run EY to losing out to the American Janet Truncale. He left the firm in December.
“The consulting industry is poised for reinvention,” IBM Consulting boss Mohamad Ali said in an internal memo announcing Baldwin’s appointment, calling him “an industry pioneer with an unparalleled track record . . . and a distinct ability to integrate technology and business expertise”.
EY’s mandatory retirement age of 60 also complicated Baldwin’s pitch to become CEO, since he would have hit that milestone halfway through the four-year term, a point some opponents said should rule him out of contention. The Financial Times reported that Baldwin had warned colleagues their deliberations risked breaching the UK’s age discrimination laws.
Baldwin is the second Big Four executive hired into a global managing partner role by IBM, succeeding Neil Dhar, who joined in October and in April was appointed head of IBM Consulting in the Americas. Dhar was previously co-head of consulting at PwC US.
Consulting is IBM’s second-largest division after software, bringing in annual revenue of almost $21bn from IT modernisation, systems integration and business process outsourcing, among other services — about the same size as EY’s advisory business.
IBM counts the Big Four accounting firms, management consultants and specialist technology consultancies such as Accenture among its competitors.
The industry is going through a sluggish period. IBM Consulting’s revenues in the second quarter were flat, year on year.