Monthly Archive:: August 2011

Does Accenture’s Acquisition of Zenta and Duck Creek Signal Industry Maturation?

In the last several days, Accenture – a firm that has largely focused on organic growth strategies and avoided significant inorganic expansion activities – announced two acquisitions: Zenta, a U.S. mortgage processing firm, and Duck Creek, a provider of software solutions for the property and casualty insurance industry. When Accenture does occasionally make acquisitions,

HP’s Strategic Decisions – What’s the Next Shoe to Drop?

In 1729, Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and political pamphleteer Jonathan Swift penned a satirical paper suggesting that to prevent the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country, and to make them beneficial to the public, the Irish should eat their own children. Driving toward services leadership may

What If the Hackers Had Attacked Sony Through Microsoft Azure Instead of Amazon’s EC2?

There is widespread speculation that the recent attack on Sony was accomplished by utilizing credit card information stolen via compute resources purchased from Amazon’s EC2 cloud offering. This high profile incident has attracted attention in the mainstream press and in the blogosphere, underscoring the interconnected and anonymous nature of cloud computing, as well as