Oracle doing due diligence on Accenture. Yep, you read that right Oracle has hired global specialists to explore the feasibility of buying multi-billion dollar consultancy Accenture, sources have told us. The database giant has engaged a team of consultants to conduct due diligence to “explore the synergies that could be created if they [Oracle] bought Accenture lock stock and barrel,” one …
That wasn't Accenture, that was PwC.
I was there and got a Monday AmEx card. Mine was coming up for renewal and I simply got a new one with Monday.
I recall I lost it cutting some amazing Columbian marching powder....
"That wasn't Accenture, that was PwC."
Yes, sorry, my post was unclear. For some idiot reason I wrote "couldn't sell" instead of "didn't try".
Oddly, my garbled post was upvoted and your correction wasn't, so I've upvoted it for you.
Putting aside my entirely rational loathing of both companies, this doesn't make a huge amount of sense, unless there's going to be a huge shift in Oracle's strategy.
Accenture don't have *any* products, so they're not analogous to the other recent acquisitions. All you get are their services. The "platforms" and "solutions" they market are packaged services deals.
So what are they buying? 400,000 consultants? Only a fraction of whom have experience with Oracle products? Just doesn't make any sense at any level.
Oh, it does, sadly it does.
Speaking as somebody employed as a strategist for a large company that has repeatedly had its fingers burned by failed big ticket M&A (and still won't learn), I can confirm that big ticket M&A always fails in terms of shareholder value, synergies, growth etc. I can also confirm that the purpose of big ticket M&A is not to achieve those things. It is what company executives do as a distraction activity to avoid real work. You or I would do some idle web-surfing, go get a coffee and chinwag with a colleague, or simply scratch our arse and try and fart quietly. If you were a salesman on the road, you'd pad your timesheet, falsify your mileage, and go and play golf.
In this context, consider that Oracle is Leisuresuit Larry, and secondary market shareholders count for jack shit. All the big wigs at Oracle are looking for a mongo deal to show what big movers and shakers they are, and to please Larry's impatience and pomposity. Rather than make Oracle products better, cheaper, more effective, easier to use, more secure, or roill up their sleeves and work on customer satisfaction or selling more, M&A is a welcome relief from the alternative of hard work and drudgery. They get to hang out with investment banks and VCs, to talk about "mergers of equals", mezzanine capital, convertible bonds, to talk endlessly about "due diligence" (you know, like HP did before buying Autonomy). M&A is simply a form of corporate masturbation. You try that in the office, and you'll be out before you've popped your cork. If the directors who get off on these things do their version, they'll offer themselves a golden shower of undeserved bonuses, issue self congratulatory press releases and the like. Note in particular at the end, the PR oik managed to remove his name before he left the building.
Savvy investors will recognise that mongo-fuckwit deals like this are the high tide marks on a market, and when they appear, there is a purpose, largely as portent of doom to those able to see, as in the case of the linked press release above.
You're right! The end times are upon us.
I must admit a dark-side admiration for the utterly outrageous lie "makes it easy for non-technical users to design contact flows, manage agents, and track performance metrics – no specialized skills required".
These people know their PHB market, and they have zero shame. Presumably Mountain View is now renamed Mountain Lair, and "do no evil" has been shorn of the superfluous "no".
This is spot on. From a ground troop/customer level, it makes about zero sense. But from a corporate "Golden Parachute" perspective, this is a winner. And it has been in the works for some time: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/2525365 , the partnership is the corporate equivalent to introducing your girlfriend to your friends. Do you even belong in the same circle?
Very interesting on many levels. Accenture have a substantial and long standing relationship with salesforce, so any such merger would have an immediate and negative impact on salesforce. For the price of what Benioff was trying to flog himself to Microsoft in 2015 (https://goo.gl/tNCEaI), this could be a shrewd way for Oracle to torpedo their biggest competitor for a similar price with A> thrown in to boot.
I fully expect the next headline to be "SAP in talks to buy CapGemini" -- it would make sense. Every big ERP vendor needs a consulting company.
I guess the idea is that software companies are moving away from selling software and onto selling monthly revenue extraction streams. Every former OS and product vendor is doing it -- their goal is to lock you into a cloud-based management tool that they sell access to rather than sell you software to implement. It's unholy, but Oracle buying a management consultancy makes sense. IBM is trying to turn their entire company into an Accenture clone. When you wrap your product in so much complexity that you need to sell services to implement it, that's a golden combination. Oracle could easily sell a set of ERP licenses "plus, we'll throw in half the population of India for _free_ to help you run it!"
It was Hurd that bought EDS and screwed it over by first taking away its solution agnosticism by going hard sell and then ripping its heart out along with all costs, be they essential or not.
Now he's lining up to do the same to the Ruperts and Camillas. Poor souls only just got back from the ski lodge.
Whilst there's a lot to look at that Hurd screwed up royally with the EDS acquisition, this "solutions agnosticism" was and always will be complete BS. EDS almost always worked with vendors who were no threat (i.e. had little to no services/outsourcing capability). There was a reason why so many of the stacks they implemented were Dell/Sun/EMC/Cisco!
Which still means that the race was prepared, the track put in place, the public and journalists convened, the athletes trained and gotten ready, everyone put on the starting line and the referee pointed the gun and fired the starting shot.
A hell of a lot of activity needs to take place before a race, and it doesn't take place if the race is not supposed to reach the finish line.
What they mean is that the deal is all but done, unless Accenture either don't want it AND put up an effective defence, or the token due diligence happens to reveal some unanticipated and particularly severe rot.
All the lawyers, banks, PR flacks and other advisors are now sniffing huge deal fees, so there's nobody around the senior twerps at Oracle telling them that Emperor Larry has no clothes, just a large army of sycophants whispering "what a beautiful leisuresuit the Emperor wears! How fine the polyester! And my, it shows his imperial physique perfectly"
"Oracle managed services"
"Accenture consultants on <project>"
Phrases like "needs to boost organic cloud numbers"
There is a post not far from where I once had a *real* desk in what was once an office. It has an "Amdocs" dent. This "Amdocs" dent matches the shape of my forehead. I foresee an additional wall decoration in the near future.
.......is when they refer to his comment about "the creative destruction of capitalism." Unfortunately the reality is that they only get the "destruction" bit. They destroy jobs, trade and shareholder value and because of their stranglehold over the current version of capitalism they get handsomely rewarded for their destructive ego waving. It should be no surprise to anyone that sociopaths frequently choose careers in managment. In another existence Norman Bates would have been the CEO of a large Corporation rather than running a small motel.
Oracle's products (minus DB) are the worst. Their services divisions are the worst. Having worked at Accenture, it's hard to see what the upside is. ACN does services and outsourcing, Oracle sells crappy software everyone hates. Unless it's "We'll buy ACN at Nx the share price", it's hard to see how this is a good move for Accenture. Seems to add a lot of exposure without adding value. For Oracle, it's a life preserver for drowning man, so I get that.
Investigation of the IT system of Munich by Accenture created in LibreOffice 5.0
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
