Accenture Pursues EfficiencyAccenture Pursues Efficiency

Outsourcing is Accenture's fastest-growing business, increasing at more than a 30% clip over the past year. With that growing demand, the company decided to standardize the portfolio-management tools it uses to help manage clients' projects and report on its service-level performance.

Accenture recently signed a multimillion-dollar deal for about 30,000 of its employees to use Mercury IT Governance Center portfolio-management tools from Mercury Interactive Corp. to help manage the client projects that Accenture's outsourcing-services business handles. The software is one of several enhancements the company is making as its outsourcing business grows.

Accenture's outsourcing deals typically involve detailed service-level agreements and measurements. Clients may ask for daily, weekly, or monthly reports on these metrics, he says. "This software provides us with tools that allow us to do this" more quickly and efficiently, says James Hall, Accenture's managing partner of technology, alliances, and solutions.

Accenture has used the software in some outsourcing-business areas, along with portfolio-management tools from other vendors, but the company decided to standardize on Mercury's software as part of its overall focus on consistency within its operations, Hall says. The company also is considering standardizing on the program for its systems-integration business, Hall says.

Standardizing on Mercury's IT governance software lets Accenture more quickly "hit the ground running with [new] clients," Hall says, because it provides an information-gathering and -reporting framework for service measurements.

Mercury's software can help Accenture quickly move its new clients to outsourced models such as running their enterprise-resource-planning and other systems, says Mercury chief marketing officer Christopher Lochhead.

Accenture is betting its business on being able to efficiently deliver outsourcing. In the second quarter of this fiscal year, ended Feb. 29, Accenture's outsourcing revenue accounted for 39% of company sales. The $1.3 billion in outsourcing revenue is an increase of 46% in U.S. dollars and 37% in local currency from a year ago. That's helped make up for slow growth in traditional consulting and integration work, which rose 4% in U.S. dollars to $2.0 billion in the quarter but fell 5% as measured in local currency.

The pattern looks likely to continue near-term: Accenture in the second quarter booked new business worth $2.9 billion in consulting and $4.8 billion in outsourcing.