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QuickCloud vs. Consulting Firms

Same outcome.
No $1M invoice.

Accenture, IBM, Deloitte, Capgemini, TCS, and Infosys all offer cloud migration engagements. They charge $250–500/hr per consultant and routinely deliver 12–36 month projects with change orders built into the model. QuickCloud delivers the same technical outcomes — automated code refactoring, database migration, identity migration, security hardening, cost governance, and QA validation — for $143,988/yr with no change orders possible.

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The Cost Comparison Is Not Close

$500K–$2M+
Typical Consulting Engagement
  • $250–500/hr per consultant × multiple headcount
  • 12–36 month engagement timeline
  • Change orders add 30–80% above the original SOW
  • Ongoing support contract required after cutover
  • Knowledge leaves with the consultants
$143,988/yr
QuickCloud Platform — All 7 Products
  • Fixed annual subscription. No change orders.
  • All 7 products included: Migration, Database, Identity, Security & Cost Intelligence, QA, Perf
  • First migration run in 4 hours from activation
  • Platform stays with your team after migration
  • Security, cost, and QA tools run continuously post-migration

A single consulting engagement at the low end of market rates ($500K) equals over 5 years of QuickCloud Platform access.

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No consulting invoice. No change orders. Ever.

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Feature-by-Feature Comparison

A direct comparison across the dimensions that matter most to procurement teams and technical leads evaluating migration options.

Dimension
QuickCloud Platform
Accenture / IBM / Deloitte / Capgemini / TCS / Infosys
Typical cost
$143,988/yr flat (all 7 products)
$250–500/hr per consultant. Full engagement: $500K–$2M+, often with change orders.
Time to first migration run
Hours from activation — first migration run same day.
3–6 months of scoping, staffing, and discovery before any code moves.
Total project timeline
Weeks to months depending on scope
12–36 months. Budget overruns and schedule extensions are endemic.
Control & IP ownership
Your team runs every phase. Automation, playbooks, and outputs stay with you.
Knowledge lives inside the consulting team. When the engagement ends, your team has no tooling.
Repeatability
Automated pipelines run on every migration. Reusable across future programs.
Work is bespoke to each engagement. Nothing is portable to your next project.
Validation & audit evidence
Parallel-run comparison with output diffs at every phase gate. Auditor-ready evidence packages.
Manual spot-checking or proprietary internal tools. Audit evidence is ad hoc.
Pricing risk
Fixed annual subscription. No change orders possible.
Change orders are standard. Scope creep routinely adds 30–80% to the original contract.
Post-migration coverage
Security monitoring, cloud cost governance, and QA testing keep running after migration.
Consultants leave at project close. Ongoing operations are your problem.
AI & source code security
AI analysis routed through a tenant-isolated gateway. Your COBOL never hits an external API directly.
Many firms route code to third-party AI tools (GitHub Copilot, OpenAI APIs) without contractual isolation.
Deep legacy platform coverage
z/OS, AS/400, HP NonStop, Unisys, NATURAL/ADABAS, RPG, 165+ asset types.
Varies by practice. Most large SIs sub-contract specialty platforms to boutique shops.

What Consulting Firms Don't Tell You

This isn't a criticism of individual consultants — most are talented engineers. It's an honest look at the structural incentives of the consulting engagement model.

1

Change orders are not exceptions — they are the business model.

Large consulting firms price discovery engagements deliberately lean. The real revenue comes from change orders when requirements expand, timelines slip, or new risks surface. A $600K SOW routinely becomes a $1.1M engagement by month nine. QuickCloud is a fixed-price subscription. There is no mechanism for a change order.

2

When the consultants leave, so does the knowledge.

After an 18-month engagement, your internal team inherits an environment they did not build, using patterns they did not create, with documentation written by people no longer on the contract. QuickCloud keeps your engineers in the driver seat throughout — they learn the platform, own the process, and retain full institutional knowledge.

3

Consulting engagements produce deliverables, not repeatable tooling.

A migration engagement produces a migrated system. It does not produce a migration platform. If you need to migrate a second application next year, you start a new engagement and pay again. QuickCloud is a subscription platform — every tool, playbook, and automation you use on the first migration is available on the second, third, and tenth.

4

Your COBOL source code may be leaving your network without your knowledge.

Several large SIs now use AI-assisted code analysis tools as part of their standard methodology. What is less publicized is where that AI analysis runs. If your consultant is using a shared SaaS code-analysis platform, your COBOL — including business logic, customer data flows, and compliance-sensitive routines — is being processed outside your network perimeter. QuickCloud routes all AI analysis through a dedicated, tenant-isolated gateway. Your source code never leaves your environment directly.

5

Manual validation is not the same as compliance evidence.

Consultants validate migrations through code review, UAT sessions, and manual testing scripts. These produce sign-off documents, not audit evidence. When your SOX auditors ask for before/after output comparisons at every phase gate, a PDF of meeting notes from a UAT workshop does not satisfy the request. QuickCloud generates machine-readable diff reports at every phase boundary — output that is structured, traceable, and defensible.

When You Should Still Consider a Consulting Firm

We believe in honest comparisons. There are scenarios where large SIs add genuine value that a software platform cannot replicate.

Genuinely suitable for large SIs:

  • Highly politicized organizational transformations where an external authority provides cover for difficult decisions
  • Multi-year programs that require dedicated project management office (PMO) resources your internal team cannot absorb
  • Heavily regulated environments (e.g., federal banking regulators, FDA) where a named advisory firm is expected by the regulator
  • Organizations with no internal engineering team — where the consulting firm is genuinely executing the work, not advising on it

Better handled by QuickCloud:

  • All technical execution — code refactoring, schema migration, identity migration, parallel-run validation
  • Automated compliance evidence generation throughout the migration lifecycle
  • Post-migration operations: security posture monitoring, cost governance, regression testing
  • Future migrations — the platform stays, so repeat work costs nothing extra

The hybrid approach: Many of our customers use a lean consulting team for program governance and stakeholder management while QuickCloud handles all technical execution. This typically costs 60–70% less than a full consulting engagement while delivering faster, more reliable technical outcomes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions from procurement teams evaluating QuickCloud against consulting alternatives.

For the majority of enterprise mainframe migrations, yes. QuickCloud handles automated code refactoring, database migration, identity migration, regression testing, and post-migration security and cost governance — the full technical stack. Where consulting firms add genuine value is in program governance, stakeholder management, and regulatory sign-off in highly politicized environments. Our recommendation: use QuickCloud for the technical execution and a lean consulting team (if needed at all) for organizational change management.
QuickCloud generates the compliance evidence — SOX audit packs, HIPAA boundary documentation, PCI DSS control mapping — that your auditors actually need. Our Modernization, Security & Cost Intelligence (AI) product automates the evidence collection process throughout the migration. Many heavily regulated organizations (financial services, healthcare) have completed migrations with QuickCloud as the primary platform, using their internal compliance team rather than a consulting firm for regulatory review.
Your QuickCloud Platform subscription covers all 7 products at a fixed annual fee. If you discover mid-migration that you have more COBOL modules than initially assessed, more RACF profiles to migrate, or more databases to move — none of that changes your subscription cost. You run more migrations against the same platform.
Several SI partners use QuickCloud as their delivery platform for migration engagements, replacing manual processes with our automation. If your consulting firm is proposing a migration engagement, it is worth asking whether they plan to use QuickCloud — and if so, whether you could license it directly and eliminate the markup.

Your next step is a walk-through, not a six-month scoping engagement.

Schedule a walk-through today. We'll run analysis against your actual source code and show you exactly how QuickCloud handles your migration — no multi-year engagement required, no change orders possible.

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Platform plan: $143,988/yr · All 7 products · No change orders · Predictable SaaS pricing

For Consulting Firms

Are You a Delivery Partner?

Many consulting firms and SIs use QuickCloud as their delivery platform — handling 3× more migrations with the same team, at higher margins. The Partner Program includes discounted licensing, deal registration, white-label Demo Studio, and a dedicated success channel.

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