As customer zero, Accenture employs an innovation-led approach to ease concerns of clients investing to scale DT

TBR perspective

As emerging technologies become a pervasive part of both IT and line-of-business leaders’ daily agendas, Accenture’s value proposition, amplified through the Accenture Innovation Architecture, positions the company to successfully address the complexity of clients’ IT systems, including through educating employees and optimizing, automating and managing the systems. Accenture’s outlook as well as the company’s investments in solutions that navigate post-digital era operations are backed by 30 years of experience supporting IT systems and working to alleviate clients’ concerns around disruption and transformation. Being customer zero, in many cases, helps Accenture showcase successful use cases of innovation-led transformation at scale where people, processes and technology can drive toward industrialized operations. Accenture recognizes that clients’ business priorities vary, but by deploying common frameworks such as cloud-first approaches, design thinking workshops and automation maturity assessments, among others, the company can continue to trade on trust with its clients, thus easing the introduction of capabilities and use cases in new areas such as blockchain and quantum computing.

With innovation, however, comes challenges. Accenture vigorously addresses hurdles such as data quality, staff skills and systems adaptation and encourages clients to do a hard reset of their IT department to close the innovation achievement gap. In the long-term battle for dominance in the IT services space, currently driven by AI, Accenture certainly walks the walk. But to maintain its leading position, the company would be better served to adopt outcome-based pricing models at scale to widen the gap with competitors. According to respondents in TBR’s 4Q18 Digital Transformation Customer Research who reported the existence of an outcome-based pricing structure with their digital transformation (DT) services vendor, the vast majority of contracts used traditional KPIs such as cost savings, technical performance or uptime as the measure of whether agreed-upon outcomes were delivered. This suggests this pricing structure remains immature, as basing even a portion of a vendor’s fees on the client’s business performance is risky for both parties. We expect DT pricing methods to mature as more data becomes available around whether and how solutions impact business outcomes.

The Accenture Technology Symposium brought together over 200 Accenture (NYSE: ACN) clients with Accenture and industry leaders and practitioners. While disrupting technologies in areas including cloud, blockchain, AI, automation and security were discussed and demoed, Accenture used the event to promote its innovation-led, industry-centric approach to solving business problems.  

TBR Weekly Preview: March 4-8

As we start winding down beginning-of-the-year earnings calls, here’s what you can expect from the TBR team this week:

Tuesday:

  • In 3Q18 TBR noted Salesforce built on its industry-specific strategies by releasing Financial Services Cloud for retail banking and by expanding its target audience for Education Cloud. Salesforce’s ongoing innovation to address vertical use cases and ability to understand customers’ business needs enabled the vendor to execute multiproduct deals in 4Q18. TBR expects Salesforce will close 4Q18 with $12.2 billion in annual revenue, keeping the vendor on track to attain its $21 billion to $23 billion annual revenue goal in 2021. (See Jack McElwee for more analysis.)
  • Google Cloud’s hiring of Thomas Kurian as CEO (replacing Diane Greene) is meant to attract enterprise customers and facilitate stronger competition at scale with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft; Kurian, former Oracle president of Product Development, brings deep understanding and detailed messaging on the technical and business impacts of cloud. TBR’s 4Q18 report will detail Google Cloud’s continued innovation among its core AI and ML portfolios while partnering and leveraging Kurian’s clout to gain enterprise mindshare, which will be increasingly critical to long-term success. (For everything Google and cloud, see Cassandra Mooshian.)

Thursday:

  • Cisco continues to grow revenue as it transforms itself through acquisitions, divestments and new product releases that enable the company to reduce its reliance on hardware — a commoditizing market — and embrace software. TBR’s 4Q18 Cisco report will include deep dives on Cisco’s most recent acquisitions, including Luxtera, which will help Cisco attract more webscale spend and improve the performance of its proprietary-based solutions, as well as Ensoft and Singularity Networks, which will broaden Cisco’s software capabilities in the service provider space. (Mike Soper leads TBR’s analysis on Cisco.)
  • TBR will also report on Cisco Services and the company’s expansion around software and next-generation solutions, which has created advisory and implementation opportunities that enabled Cisco Services to accelerate growth in 2018. An increase in software-related services as well as adoption of next-generation secure and intelligent platforms and products that support clients’ digital business will create attached services opportunities for Cisco Services, driving revenue expansion throughout 2019. (For more on Cisco Services, see Kelly Lesiczka.)
  • TBR’s latest report on Perspecta will provide an update on how the fledgling company is managing the task of integrating three legacy organizations into a unified whole. In past reports, we have talked about how the company’s innovation incubator, Perspecta Labs, underpins its long-term position in the federal services landscape. Our 4Q18 Perspecta report will dive more deeply into how the company introduces Perspecta Labs to its biggest client, the U.S. Navy, in advance of the recompete of Perspecta’s largest contract, which entails managing the Navy Next Generation Enterprise Network. (Joey Cresta heads up TBR’s Public Sector practice.)
  • As reported in our initial response, NetApp earned $1.6 billion in revenue in 4Q18, representing a 1.6% year-to-year increase. Strong 1H18 revenue momentum enabled the vendor to achieve solid year-to-year revenue growth for 2018, demonstrating the success of some of NetApp’s strategic moves during the year. Our full report will dive into the 2018 establishment of a cloud infrastructure business unit that will enable NetApp to pivot its portfolio further in 2019, as the company, one of the few major pure play storage vendors left in the market, transforms itself to establish its brand as one that enables customers’ digital transformations. (See Stephanie Long for more analysis.)

Friday:

  • Utilizing its technology expertise and ability to address clients’ business challenges, Capgemini reached its 2018 revenue growth and profitability goals and is confidently moving into 2019. Capgemini’s bookings reached their highest level since 1Q17 in 4Q18. In the latest full report, TBR will note how the increase in bookings, combined with Capgemini’s unified go-to-market approach; enhanced offerings around digital, cloud and industry-specific solutions; and reinforced expertise via training and reskilling, will enable the company to sustain revenue growth. (Elitsa Bakalova covers Capgemini for TBR.)

Be on the lookout for additional analysis from TBR, including assessments of Accenture Technology and TELUS International. TBR’s next webinar will be held March 20 and feature Senior Analyst John Caucis talking about healthcare IT services.

Technology Business Research, Inc. announces 2Q19 webinar schedule

HAMPTON, N.H. (March 4, 2019) — Technology Business Research, Inc. (TBR) announces the schedule for its 2Q19 webinar series.

April 10        Progress report: State of the NFV/SDN telecom market

April 17        Channel partner ecosystems will evolve to support digital adoption

April 24        Evolutionary IoT: Starting small and controlling costs

May 1           Obstacles and triumphs on the journey to cloud

May 8           Health IT converges around consumerization, value and ROI

May 15        30 minutes, 3 months, 3 years: Evolution of digital transformation

May 22        Bringing the best: Talent and technology in management consulting

June 12        The makings of the telecom edge compute market

June 26        Where will hyperconverged infrastructure fit in the modern data center?

TBR webinars are held typically each Wednesday at 1 p.m. ET and include a 15-minute Q&A session following the main presentation. Previous webinars can be viewed anytime on TBR’s Webinar Portal.

For additional information or to arrange a briefing with our analysts, please contact TBR at [email protected].