Accenture Invests $250M In Tech Consulting Biz

Systems integrator Accenture this week said it plans to invest more than $250 million over the next three years to expand its technology consulting capabilities and extend its reach into growing markets such as security.

The investment will "fundamentally change the way we do business," said Gary Curtis, global managing director of Accenture Technology Consulting, a four-month-old group within Accenture (No. 2 on the VARBusiness 500) that was funded by the investment. The group comprises many of New York-based company's business practices, including IT strategy, security and infrastructure transformation.

The aim of the investment is to better assist clients to align information technology and business strategy, Curtis said.

"We help clients do this on a regular basis," Curtis said. "We're exposed to this everyday, with well understood best practices. Sometimes companies tend to short shrift their own needs, but we said, 'We won't do that. We know how to do this. We ate our own dog food.' "

Curtis said the new technology consulting organization will streamline the way customers work with Accenture. Instead of having to go through various, separate practices, clients can now take advantage of different aspects of Accenture's expertise by going through the Technology Consulting group.

"We brought all the practices' expertise together and identified specialists in vertical markets and moved them into this group, so we have the right mixture," Curtis said. "The organization is new, but it is comprised of practices that have existed within the company. Now we all have same market view." The firm is aggressively hiring worldwide, he added.

Among the areas of growth the company plans to tackle in the near-term through its investment are security and maintenance of legacy applications. "Security consulting is probably the fastest growing need. Almost every enterprise cannot get enough security advice, and not just on products, but also in building programs, such as identity management," Curtis said. "Ninety percent of clients don't have strong, user-friendly identity management systems. Many need better intrusion detection, and they need to make large data systems more accessible to internal users."

Additionally, management of legacy applications can weigh companies down and prevent them from moving ahead. Increasingly, Curtis noted, Accenture sees clients with old applications, which require more maintenance and fail more often. "We help automate speed and effectiveness, alleviating much of the manual labor that companies undertake," he said.

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