A second type of strategic business consulting firm, focuses on offering advice about changing business processes. That includes recommendations for the consultant to help the client build and install new information technology infrastructure. IT focused consulting companies are a small segment but they are one of the most important forces driving the worldwide adoption of big data culture. They need some business data annalists but even more they need data scientists and teams of experienced software engineers. The world leader in this market is Ireland-based accenture, with $32 billion in revenues. An example of the kind of large-scale IT project accenture takes on, is its 5 year, $563 million year contract awarded in January 2015 by the US government to run the new and formerly quite poorly managed federal health insurance website healthcare.gov. Other examples of companies in the same space include Palantir based in Palantir, California and Opera Solutions based in New York City. Palantir founded in 2004 Generated an estimated $500-580 million in revenues in 2014. Palantir is growing rapidly and is one of the three most highly valued privately held companies in the US, having raised over $1 billion in equity investment. With a most recent evaluation estimated to be over $15 billion. In it's own words, Palantir specializes in analysis, but we don't actually do the analysis ourselves, we write software that enables experts in their respective fields to extract insight from information, unquote. Opera Solutions, also founded in 2004, in its own words, quote, applies advanced analytics to big data flows to extract predictive patterns, unquote. Opera does not disclose revenues and is clearly on a somewhat smaller scale than Palantir, but it has raised over 120 million in venture investment and has over 500 employees worldwide. Stepping away to look at the big picture. What information technology consulting firms do, is introduce the technologically newest methods for achieving competitive advantage into a particular vertical market, such as retail grocery stores. They identify one company in that market with an early adopter culture. A company willing to take some risks in return for the potential advantage of having new technology implemented first. Let's say that first company does successfully implement some form of better data driven decision making and it starts to generate higher revenues or better profit margins. Now, that company's direct competitors have no real choice but to upgrade their own IT systems or face disruption. The same strategic consulting firm that helped the first company now has a much easier time selling the same type of technology solution to the first companies direct competitors. Soon all surviving companies in a sector have roughly the same type of information technology capability and the endless cycle of upgrades repeats. Buzzwords tend to surround these upgrades and big data is the biggest buzzword of all, but in this case the hype is justified.