Accenture to Invest $250M in IT

NEW YORK -- 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.”

Accenture