Vendor Analysis
published on Sep 29, 2017
Report Overview:
This NelsonHall vendor assessment analyzes Accenture's offerings and capabilities in SAP HANA and S4/HANA services.
Who is this Report for:
NelsonHall’s SAP HANA and S/4HANA Services Vendor Assessment for Accenture is a comprehensive assessment of Accenture’s SAP HANA and S/4HANA services offerings and capabilities designed for:
- Sourcing managers monitoring the capabilities of existing suppliers of IT services and identifying vendor suitability for SAP services
- Vendor marketing, sales and business managers looking to benchmark themselves against their peers
- Financial analysts and investors specializing in SAP services sector.
Scope of this Report:
The report provides a comprehensive and objective analysis of Accenture’s SAP HANA and S/4HANA service offerings, capabilities and market and financial strength, including:
- Analysis of the company’s offerings and key service components
- Revenue estimates
- Identification of the company’s strategy, emphasis and new developments
- Analysis of the profile of the company’s customer base including the company’s targeting strategy and examples of current contracts
- Analysis of the company’s strengths, weaknesses and outlook.
Key Findings & Highlights:
Accenture is focusing heavily on next generation capabilities or "The New", as it calls it, which is digital, cloud, and security-related services, supported by new technology. This includes expanded use of automation capabilities internally. In FY16, Accenture invested ~$930m in acquisitions, on top of ~$800m in FY15. Approximately 70% of these investments in acquisitions have been in "The New".
While Accenture has been an aggressive acquirer over the last few years, it has focused primarily on niche industry-focused consulting capabilities, digital design, and SaaS consulting capabilities (in particular Salesforce). It has not acquired to specifically augment its core SAP or HANA capabilities.
Accenture positions its HANA and S/4HANA offerings in support of its broader digital transformation services. Given its strengths in digital and industry consulting, it is a natural fit for Accenture to lead with these capabilities and position S/4HANA as a foundational tool to enable the achievement of a defined business objective. With these broad objectives, Accenture works with clients to lay out the long-term roadmap, which can stretch three to five years but is segmented into individual initiatives.
Accenture has ~47k employees with SAP skills. It says that nearly all possess some level of HANA or S/4HANA skills, as training programs were put in place in 2014 to re-skill them for HANA, S/4HANA, and other SAP Cloud Platform capabilities such as Fiori, Hybris, Concur, and Ariba.
NelsonHall estimates that, of this team, ~10% (~4.7k) are dedicated HANA and S/4HANA employees actively supporting new engagements.
It has an established global network of innovation centers in support of SAP solutions in locations including San Jose, California; Chicago; New York; Sophia Antipolis, France; Bangalore, India; and Sydney, Australia.
Accenture states that it has completed ~200 SAP HANA adoption projects, both greenfield installations that require data migration from the old system to the new SAP HANA environment; and brownfield migrations, moving from existing systems, upgrading and reusing existing application hardware selectively. Accenture is looking to target larger initiatives, primarily through bundled implementations or those with a broader scope including consulting and ongoing application management. It feels that smaller, single implementation efforts are not its strength and not a priority internally.