Accenture (ACN): Sentelis Acquisition And $341 Million Commerce Department Contract

By Amit Chowdhry ● Jun 17, 2020
  • Accenture Plc (NYSE: ACN) has announced it has acquired Sentelis and Accenture Federal Services (AFS) unveiled it won a $341 million Department of Commerce contract

Accenture Plc (NYSE: ACN) has made a couple of major announcements this week. The leading global professional services company entered an agreement to buy Sentelis and Accenture Federal Services (AFS) unveiled it won a $341 million contract for helping the Department of Commerce modernize and consolidate its core business systems.

Sentelis Acquisition

What does Sentelis do? Sentelis is an independent data consulting and engineering company based out of France that specializes in designing and scaling data and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. Going forward, Sentelis is joining Accenture Applied Intelligence and will complement its focus on helping clients build the right data strategy and foundation for industrializing AI across their businesses.

Sentelis has over 50 highly skilled professionals, including data and AI advisors, architects and engineers. And since its founding in 2011, Sentelis helped a number of clients, including some of the largest French companies, architect, engineer, and scale adapted and secure data-centric architecture thus enabling them to accelerate business innovation.

The combination of Sentelis’s industry experience — especially in financial services and retail — with Accenture’s expertise in global large-scale AI and machine learning engineering initiatives would provide highly differentiated end-to-end services within the European market.

“The addition of the strong technical talent of Sentelis’s teams, combined with our AI and big data solutions, and deep industry expertise, would be a major opportunity to strengthen and broaden our ability to help clients scale AI across their businesses,” said Olivier Girard, market unit lead of Accenture France and Benelux. “In addition to organically growing talent, Accenture’s strategic approach to acquisitions is designed to ensure the right capabilities are in place to meet existing, as well as emerging, client needs with speed and scale. Together, we would be able to help a broader range of clients industrialize innovation in data strategy and AI.”

“Our research shows that a strong data foundation underpins an organization’s ability to successfully scale AI,” added Athina Kanioura, chief analytics officer and global lead for Accenture Applied Intelligence. “Strategic acquisitions — like Sentelis — are bringing greater capacity and enhanced capabilities to our data and AI client work. Sentelis’s data strategy, architecture and engineering skills align seamlessly with Accenture’s focus on industrialized, end-to-end solutions. With the addition of Sentelis, we would see even greater opportunity to accelerate how our clients gain value from data and AI across their business.”

“Today, smart businesses are adopting and pursuing digital transformation to balance innovation and industrialization at scale, and to allow their organizations to be seamlessly integrated with the wider ecosystem. To create an intelligent enterprise, it must be built around a mix of digital platforms, with data and AI at its core,” explained Isabelle Regnier and Jean-Baptiste Ceccaldi, respectively executive director and president of Sentelis. “This is why, in today’s growing data-driven market, joining Accenture would be a unique opportunity to enlarge our approach to new sectors and help more organizations to leverage their information systems to accelerate their digital transformations.”

This acquisition would strengthen Accenture’s growing analytics, artificial intelligence, and ML/data engineering business in France. And global growth in AI client engagements has also served as a driver for Accenture’s recent acquisitions of Analytics8 in Australia, Pragsis Bidoop in Spain, Clarity Insights in North America, Mudano in the UK, and Byte Prophecy in India.

The terms of the deal were undisclosed. And the acquisition requires prior consultation with the relevant works councils and would be subject to customary closing conditions.

$341 Million Department Of Commerce Contract

Accenture Federal Services (AFS), a subsidiary of Accenture Plc (NYSE: ACN), announced it has been awarded a $341 million contract to help the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) modernize its core business systems and data platform for centralizing administrative functions and support real-time business decision making. And the contract — under the DOC’s Business Applications Solution (BAS) program — will run for one base year with 19 option years.

As part of the terms of the contract, AFS will help the DOC consolidate its core finance, acquisition, property, enterprise data warehouse, and other business systems into a commercial software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform in a hosted environment. And the consolidated platform — supported with data warehouse and business intelligence solutions — will increase the DOC’s visibility into its enterprise-wide financial activities.

“The Department of Commerce’s plan to modernize its business systems enables the agency to gain a more complete picture of its budget and spending trends and improve financial decision-making,” commented John Goodman, Chief Executive Officer of Accenture Federal Services. “We’re delighted to support them using proven commercial platforms to consolidate their business and back office applications into a single suite of systems.”

This centralized customer-centered approach to business systems modernization will enable the DOC to consolidate its enterprise-wide data while also enabling its finance data users to delve deeper into real-time financial analysis, including trend and root cause analysis.

“AFS is honored to continue our relationship with the Department of Commerce to modernize its Business Application Solutions,” noted Scott Dowling, BAS managing director at Accenture Federal Services. “Through the use of human centered design, DOC can create a consensus-building environment and achieve operational efficiencies across the department. This will ultimately help DOC reduce operation redundancies, simplify administrative functions and modernize its data platform while meeting OMB requirements.”

As part of the contract, DOC will use Accenture Federal Service’s FedRamp solutions, including Accenture Federal Cloud ERP (AFCE), Managed Detection and Response (MDR), and the Accenture Insights Platform (AIP). And AFS has supported Commerce since the early 2000s, doing work for the agency in analytics, artificial intelligence, cyber security, digital transformation, finance operations, and a number of other business functions.