Accenture to Invest $250 Million to Expand Technology Consulting Capabilities

Accenture will invest more than $250 million over the next three years to expand its technology consulting capabilities to help clients align information technology and business strategy.

"Aligning IT with business strategy has, once again, become a top issue for companies worldwide. 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,” said William D. Green, Chairman & CEO, Accenture.

The investment is designed to address a strong increase in demand from clients for services and advice from technology-platform-independent services providers.

It 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.

It 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.

The investment will enable Accenture 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.

It would also focus on a series of enterprise network offerings that leverage Accenture's expertise in designing and building converged data and voice systems, highly specialized IT infrastructure and application security capabilities and next-generation workplace capabilities to help deploy IT to automate common workplace activities.

“We are enhancing the services we offer by building and expanding our technical capabilities and investing aggressively in our workforce,” said Don Rippert, Chief Technology Officer, Accenture.