Hundreds of Deloitte officials from around the world who earn their keep advising companies are descending on San Jose this week to get consulted on how Silicon Valley ticks.
“Silicon Valley is simply a very special place in the U.S. economy, for sure. It also has symbolic significance that goes beyond zip codes – the role it has played in innovation,” said James Quigley, chief executive of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, the worldwide umbrella group of Deloitte & Touche member firms.
Quigley will help convene the company’s annual three-day world meeting, which kicks off Wednesday. For a few days, it will seem as though Deloitte owns San Jose. Its signs will dot the city’s downtown, where the conference will be held at the Fairmont Hotel. Giant Deloitte banners will hang from the former Knight Ridder building, and its name will appear on the Center for Performing Arts marquee as well as on taxis.
Deloitte’s consultants will be divided into teams that will visit 35 valley companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Oracle, Flextronics, the Mayfield Fund venture capital firm and the law offices of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, which specializes in taking companies public.
Deloitte, one of the world’s giant consulting companies with annual revenue of $23 billion, has expanded dramatically as a result of globalization and tech innovation that has come out of the valley. In the 1980s, it had a mere 20 employees based in China. Today, it has more than 5,000 representatives in the country, and a total of 10,000 on the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Deloitte has 150,000 employees worldwide, including 2,500 in the Bay Area.
“Professional services have done well in the last 20 years,” Quigley said.
It wasn’t that long ago that only giant multinationals sought the services of consultants to help navigate complex international tax codes or set up back-end communications systems linking their vast outposts. Now start-ups that go directly from the garage to global operations need their advice, he said.
“There was a time when the barriers to your competitor getting access to your marketplace were dramatically different, when the customer was an airplane flight away,” Quigley said. Now, he added, “the customer is a click away.”
Contact John Boudreau at jboudreau@mercurynews.com or (408) 278-3496.
