The Industry-Wide Significance of Accenture’s PureApps Acquisition

Accenture recently announced its acquisition of PureApps, a UK-based Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) provider.  Our understanding is that it’s a full-service provider for all Oracle Hyperion EPM and BA solutions. Nevertheless, PureApps is a small firm and the revenue won’t make a noticeable difference to Accenture. So why is Accenture buying PureApps? My opinion: they are buying a niche player as an influence point with a stakeholder group that is growing in importance in the technology and in BPO services.

PureApps’ services in implementing Oracle Hyperion give them relationships at the office of the CFO. As I recently blogged, the office of the CFO is growing in influence for tech spend, especially in the transformation space. With this acquisition, Accenture gains the advantage of a set of services and immediate credibility in serving CFOs.

This is a nice — and important — acquisition as it gives Accenture the following benefits:

• Enables more relevance and a counter play to the CFO access sphere that Deloitte and the Big Four consulting firms currently enjoy for large-scale transformation projects.
• Strengthens Accenture’s position in the European markets.

Bottom line: the acquisition is a smart play for stable growth in the core consulting/transformation space, which will continue to grow as the digital world gains momentum.