Published on the 14/01/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
Accenture, which already has 42,000 staff dedicated to providing SAP services (46 percent of them in the Asia/Pacific/Japan region), has further tightened its links with the German software giant …
Three years ago the companies announced that they were developing a framework that would allow them to work together closely – even to the extent of providing a single bill for products and services that were jointly developed and delivered. In 2014 the companies joined together formally to deliver cloud services based on HANA.
This week the companies have tightened those links, this time announcing they would work together on Business Suite 4 SAP HANA development and deployment, ostensibly extending the reach of the alliance (which has been largely enterprise focused in the past) into the mid-market.
The proof will be in the pudding.
Gartner’s 2015 SAP services Magic Quadrant already has Accenture pegged as the global leader in the field. But it’s a crowded market – with around 3,200 SAP service providers operating globally – and the leaders quadrant also features significant competitors such as IBM, Deloitte, Infosys and CapGemini.
Gartner has already cautioned that with scale comes risk, noting that Accenture might not be as interested in smaller or niche SAP deployments, preferring instead the large enterprise scale contracts with significant recurring revenues.
And, while there are clear benefits from a deep understanding of software, the extreme links between SAP and Accenture call into question the latter’s ability to truly describe itself as an independent systems integrator given the skin it now has in the SAP game,
Paul Daugherty, chief technology officer for Accenture for example has already acknowledged that; “Accenture developers and industry experts are now working side by side with SAP, providing us with unique input, insight and development opportunities with SAP S/4HANA. For example, our teams in Germany and Shanghai are helping SAP with the design and build of the SAP S/4HANA Finance solution.
“In addition, we plan to involve clients as part of a broader co-innovation strategy to ensure that we are optimising our development efforts for SAP S4/HANA to meet their needs and help them stay competitive across industries and markets.”
In terms of sales strategies the companies plan to co-invest in developing solutions and hiring staff targeted at meeting the needs of specific vertical markets.
