Accenture has gobbled up Spanish engineering services company Arca to bolster its suite of network transformation services, including 5G implementation. The upshot is that 640 Arca employees will join Accenture in Spain and help the management consultancy target clients based there and in Portugal. According to the official announcement, Arca provides “multidisciplinary services for network operations.” Its skillset apparently stretches across engineering, designing, deploying and managing telecom infrastructure. Arca also brings to the party an “integrated platform” that purportedly “automates network monitoring, optimizes processes and predicts system anomalies.” The idea is to combine Arca’s know-how with Accenture’s SynOps platform, an AI-powered tool designed to help organizations function more efficiently, in order to reinforce what Accenture sees as its “key role” in the network management consultancy space – advising and partnering with clients in the design, deployment and operation of services, such as 5G and IoT.
Accenture is enormous – it has around 500,000 employees — helped in part by spending oodles on firms that can broaden its expertise and keep up with the latest tech trends, particularly in the fields of analytics, mobile, cloud and cybersecurity. Each year the firm reportedly spends roughly $1bn on around two dozen acquisitions. this amount is a relatively small sum given that Accenture made $43.2 billion in revenues in its last fiscal year, and about $1.1 billion in net income. The deal-making seems to be working out, too. Sales were up 8.5% last year in local currency units, and Accenture is this year guiding for revenue growth of between 5% and 8% in local currency units.