Accenture

18 June 2007
Accenture to Invest $250 Million to Expand Technology Consulting Capabilities to Help Clients Align IT Strategy with Business Strategy

NEW YORK; June 18, 2007 – Accenture (NYSE:ACN) will invest more than $250 million over the next three years to expand its technology consulting capabilities to help clients better align information technology and business strategy.  The investment is designed to address a strong increase in demand from clients for services and advice from technology-platform-independent services providers.

The investment will enable Accenture to enhance its strategy planning, marketing, offering and asset development, alliance development and management, and recruiting and training for its technology capabilities.

Specifically, the investment will focus on helping clients: develop IT strategies that deliver measurable business outcomes; standardize, virtualize and secure their IT infrastructures and applications; improve worker productivity; and implement new consumer-like, Web-based applications that tap into the potential of services-oriented architecture (SOA) and other newer technologies.

"Aligning IT with business strategy has, once again, become a top issue for companies worldwide," said William D. Green, Accenture's chairman & CEO.  "To address this, we are enhancing the end-to-end services we offer through Accenture Technology Consulting, an organization within our Systems Integration & Technology growth platform.  We will complement our rich portfolio of assets and processes with new services that provide greater insight into IT's impact on business performance.  This is becoming particularly important as companies face new challenges in a variety of areas, particularly application renewal, information security and compliance.  Our unique status as one of the few, and certainly largest, independent sources for technology services should position us well in addressing the dramatically increased demand we've seen for these services over the last year."

Among the services Accenture Technology Consulting offers are IT strategy and transformation; IT merger integration; infrastructure transformation; security; and offerings that enable companies to cost-effectively renew legacy applications and provide in-depth IT performance assessments and metrics.  The $250 million investment will enable Accenture Technology Consulting to expand on the development of:

• Next-generation data center capabilities, including data center consolidation; server consolidation and rationalization; storage transformation; test- and development-environment transformation; service desk optimization; and "green computing" for optimizing data-center performance while reducing power consumption;
• A series of enterprise network offerings that leverage Accenture's expertise in designing and building converged data and voice systems, including Internet protocol-based networks, which address the mobility demands of today's workforce by enabling anytime, anywhere access to corporate information, databases, e-mail and applications;
• Highly specialized IT infrastructure and application security capabilities focused on helping organizations decrease risk, reduce costs, maintain business continuity, improve productivity and allow secure interaction with employees, business partners and customers through effective identity and access management; and 
• Next-generation workplace capabilities to help deploy IT to automate common workplace activities, including a solution that redefines the workplace as being wherever the employee needs or wants to work, and from any device, anywhere, anytime.

Don Rippert, Accenture's chief technology officer, said, "We are enhancing the services we offer by building and expanding our technical capabilities and investing aggressively in our workforce.  We bring together the entire range of IT solutions – from the upfront IT strategy to optimization of the underlying infrastructure and applications – necessary to deliver transformational results that clearly improve our clients' business performance and competitiveness.  We believe that those who truly want to achieve high performance will strive to analyze improvement opportunities across their entire IT landscape, considering processes, people, IT operations and governance to make a positive impact on business performance."

"The market for technology consulting services continues to grow at a steady pace as companies seek IT strategies to deal with a variety of issues ranging from compliance requirements to large and complex transformational initiatives," said Curtis Price, program director at industry analyst firm IDC.  "IDC believes that Accenture's investment in technology consulting services is a perfect complement to the company's deep industry knowledge and strong management consulting operations.  The development of a comprehensive set of technology consulting solutions, combined with the market demand for independent services providers, will enable Accenture to expand its sphere of influence and drive a more strategic relationship with companies seeking to leverage IT to meet business objectives."

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Committed to delivering innovation, Accenture collaborates with its clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments.  With deep industry and business process expertise, broad global resources and a proven track record, Accenture can mobilize the right people, skills and technologies to help clients improve their performance.  With more than 152,000 people in 49 countries, the company generated net revenues of US$16.65 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2006.  Its home page is www.accenture.com.