Accenture Looks For A Business App As Good As XboxAccenture Looks For A Business App As Good As Xbox

Accenture CEO Joe Forehand says the IT services and consulting firm is not in the market for any major acquisitions but is looking at "tactical" opportunities to buy up companies that would give Accenture a bigger presence in fast-growing markets like business-process outsourcing.

At a media briefing in New York on Tuesday, Forehand also said he would not like to see Accenture merged with any larger IT vendor in the way that PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting was folded into IBM. "We'd rather be the hunter than the hunted," Forehand said.

Forehand also said he believes that big business is again ready to start spending money on consulting, the part of Accenture's offerings that has been hit hardest by the economic downturn. "For the past couple of years, CEOs have been looking at their feet. Now they're ready to start looking forward," Forehand said. Last month, Accenture said consulting revenue in its fiscal fourth quarter declined 8% year over year to $1.87 billion.

However, Forehand--insisting that "IT still matters"--said C-level executives' need for real-time information that will help them better manage their business will drive the next wave of spending on consulting and business-transformation services. "I've yet to find an executive who says they have all the information at the right time to run their business; that's the opportunity," Forehand said.

He added that areas such as radio-frequency identification, business analytics, and application software will be the focus of significant IT innovation over the next several years. "Application software is still quite clunky compared to the [Microsoft] Xbox or [Sony] Playstation. Will there be a business version of Xbox?"