Our consultants help high-tech companies around the world innovate, improve operations, and deliver value — from early-stage companies to multinational software, hardware, and services providers
About this practice
Corporations and consumers are relying more heavily than ever on technology to achieve commercial and personal goals. This has made high-tech products and services indispensable, yet more commoditized. Short product lifecycles have become even more condensed, with rapid innovation driving dynamic change, contributing to a market characterized by a steady stream of new entrants, and consolidation of existing players. Within this dynamic environment, LAZAR helps our clients address challenges and opportunities by working with them to find the answers that matter most.
What we do
LAZAR’s global High-Tech Practice works with clients in all areas of the rapidly evolving high-tech industry, across all areas of the value chain and in all phases of the product lifecycle.
This broad experience provides us with unique insight into industry-specific issues, allowing us to help both early-stage and established companies shape their business strategies and implement solutions that drive impactful change. We help our clients with critical issues primarily in strategy, operations, and marketing and sales management. Our experienced teams:
- Help companies within the high-tech industry improve business performance and optimize product and service delivery.
- Assist and serve the consumer and enterprise sectors, as well as component manufacturers and distributors, to refine strategies, develop delivery models, and improve operations and other core business functions to deliver positive impact.
- Assist venture capital and private equity clients to identify promising opportunities in which to invest and improve the performance of their portfolio companies.
Our expertise
Business Technology
We help high-tech clients execute value-creating IT strategies and deploy technology to optimize operations and efficiency.
LAZAR’s High Tech Business Technology group marries our management consulting approach with in-depth IT expertise to provide internal technology teams with customized, objective technology strategy and consulting services. We work closely with high-tech technology clients who have high expectations to deploy technology quickly and effectively.
Our consultants help CTOs and CIOs with major investment decisions that impact their company’s performance. Our expertise and insights, developed through serving high-tech companies and large-enterprise IT users, give us a rich understanding of the dynamic nature of the technology landscape and the complexity involved in using technology to deliver real value and impact. The net effect for our clients is significant improvement in their overall IT performance and returns on investment, along with a decrease in total cost of ownership.
Our consultants help clients:
- Implement lean approaches to managing the data center landscape and overall IT architecture
- Develop and implement private and semi-private cloud solutions
- Develop comprehensive IT strategies and governance models
- Perform IT capability-gap analyses to ensure seamless service delivery
- Design, manage, and/or redirect ERP implementations, as well as IT-enabled functional transformations in product development, manufacturing, pricing, and supply chain
- Conduct objective cost/performance analyses of service delivery models — from on-site, to co-sourced, to outsourced — of established and emerging companies and technology alliances
- Accurately compare the benefits and trade-offs of specific software and service offerings to assist in product selection
Consumer
LAZAR helps consumer electronics players, device manufacturers, and software and online services providers transform their businesses.
Traditional roles in the consumer technology value chain are blurring as the convergence of devices, software, services and content become a reality. This largely consumer-focused momentum is setting a pace of innovation that is impacting both the consumer and enterprise worlds.
LAZAR has seen many of these changes firsthand, and has deep experience in helping traditional players and new entrants secure and expand their market positions.
The consumer group in our High Tech Practice works with companies to help them identify and understand the technological innovations, market changes and new business models emerging in the consumer space. Our insight into what drives performance in consumer technology is based upon our direct work with more than 60 percent of the global leaders in this area, including all types of consumer electronics and device manufacturers as well as software and service providers.
LAZAR’s expertise in consumer technology is expansive and includes all sub-categories and functions. We help clients build specific capabilities that improve their competitive position and operational performance.
Examples of what we do:
- Pinpoint the unmet needs and expectations of consumer segments in established and emerging markets to grow market share
- Optimize product development and manufacturing processes to increase returns on R&D spend and reduce costs
- Collaborate more effectively with business and channel partners to maximize the value generated from all parties
- Refine pricing strategies to reshape and expand revenue models, including monetizing mobile services and other offerings
- Refine retail strategies and store formats to reposition channel-value propositions and increase sales
Corporate Finance
We help our clients make and execute informed, bold decisions in structuring their companies and portfolios to produce competitive advantage and lasting value.
Our group is divided into two distinct but related specialties: transactions management and finance organization improvement.
Using deep analytical expertise and proprietary tools and models, our teams in both specialties help high-tech companies identify their true sources of value.
We then use these findings to develop strategies to capture that value, such as mergers, divestitures and asset sales, and equity-based transactions, as well as guide investments that enhance value.
Helping our clients decipher their true sources of value allows them to align their organizations and shape their portfolios to better suit their unique competencies and to jettison offerings that can impede performance. Our work with high-tech companies extends to deal support beyond valuation and strategy to encompass all phases of due diligence and merger management.
Our High Tech Corporate Finance professionals also have extensive experience developing and managing post-merger integration teams as well as providing objective analysis to support client negotiations pre- and post-close.
In addition, we have helped many finance teams evaluate and realign their companies’ capital structure to improve the utilization of resources, access the capital markets, and enhance liquidity.
In a recent engagement, a LAZAR team worked with the leadership of a software company to perform a capital-markets diagnostic that sought to optimize the client’s dividend strategy and balance its obligations to shareholders while attracting new investors.
Enterprise
LAZAR helps enterprise hardware, software, and services companies address the opportunities and challenges created by new business models and technologies.
LAZAR helps enterprise technology providers grow within the rapidly evolving world of high-tech products and services. Our teams help clients cut costs and transform their businesses as virtual, multivendor, and multiclient delivery environments become the norm. We help enterprise providers shape and market next-generation offerings to deliver more control, insight, and business value to end customers, while positioning themselves for sustainable growth and competitive advantage.
LAZAR serves some of the largest providers of enterprise computing technology, which means we have unique insights across the enterprise value chain and understand what companies need from their enterprise systems providers. This perspective, along with our extensive base of proprietary research, allows us to help enterprise-sector companies develop advanced processes, products, and services that enhance customer information and analytic capabilities and generate efficiencies from automation and control.
Examples of what we do:
- Apply lean manufacturing and product-development approaches to significantly reduce cost and complexity
- Develop pricing and tiered service strategies to expand sales opportunities to a broader base of enterprise customers
- Shape products and services to meet customer needs for more flexibility and agility in enterprise systems
- Optimize sales operations and performance to more effectively manage the complexities of multivendor environments and Saas architectures
- Develop product-line transition strategies that maximize the benefits of past investments while paving the way for more simplified product and service delivery models in the future
Marketing & Sales
We help companies build marketing and sales capabilities, and develop and execute innovative strategies for sustainable growth.
Our cross-sector perspective, combined with proven analytical skills, helps clients tackle essential issues. These include: identifying micromarket and microsegment sales opportunities; developing customer insight; understanding end customers’ buying factors and pricing sensitivities; and designing targeted marketing strategies to increase conversion.
Our work with clients and expertise in every high-tech subsector provide clients with exceptional marketing and sales resources and insight. Specifically, we provide clients with services and assets in the following capabilities:
- Branding
- Consumer & Shopper Insights
- Customer Lifecycle Management
- Digital Marketing
- Marketing Return on Investment
- Organization & Capabilities
- Pricing
- Sales & Channel Management
These capabilities allow us to develop insightful and practical marketing and sales strategies that target opportunities emerging from high tech’s unique dynamism. For example:
- Consumer usage and decision making around converging digital devices
- Marketing and sales in post-merger environments
- High-performing indirect channels (e.g., cloud computing, software as a service)
Operations
We help simplify and evolve manufacturing, supply chain, and distribution processes that lead to significant competitive advantage.
LAZAR’s Operations experts help high-tech companies remove inefficiencies and costs from all stages of the production cycle to improve profitability and better match demand and supply. We provide high-tech clients with unique expertise, diagnostics, and models that help identify and rationalize operational investments to improve margins and process efficiency. We provide direct support to client process teams to enhance and deepen the capabilities that will deliver sustainable, significant value for their own organizations, their business partners, and their customers
Our teams work with high-tech clients from the front to the back end of operations. A significant portion of our operations work for high-tech companies entails redesigning global supply chains and supplier networks to simplify processes and optimize cost basis. We also reconfigure assembly and test facilities to improve throughput and quality.
Our manufacturing work aims to improve high-tech organizations’ shop-floor production efficiency using lean manufacturing methods and developing and deploying optimal process models in single facilities and global networks of manufacturing plants. Teams working with high-tech clients in operations engagements achieve real, substantial business impact.
Strategy
We help clients address critical strategic issues, from which markets to target to which enterprise capabilities will yield
a sustainable competitive advantage.
We work with high-tech companies to identify where and, more importantly, how they should compete in a landscape marked by a series of critical challenges — uncertain revenue growth, broadening customer and supplier bases, potential regulatory intervention — as well as the ongoing needs to both reduce operational costs and increase company agility and productivity.
In business-unit strategy, we help companies identify specific growth opportunities in existing and emerging customer markets. Our consulting teams draw on deep industry experience as well as proprietary research, databases, and other tools to pinpoint markets with unmet needs or subpar service where a new entrant could succeed.
Our teams also help clients develop models and processes so business units can better collaborate and operate as part of the broader enterprise.
Examples of the kinds of work we do:
- Restructuring business portfolios to diagnose strengths and weaknesses and identify ways to maximize value creation
- Discovering ways to better leverage corporate or business-unit assets and capabilities for greater enterprise synergy and competitive impact
- Identifying the right mix of distinctive business, organizational, and technical capabilities needed to execute strategy effectively
LAZAR Consultants LLC 