This article is more than 1 year old

Accenture barges way into cloud market, buys Cloud Sherpas

It's a game changer, a paradigm shift, we've reached 'tipping point,' says chief BS officer

Bloated integrator-cum-consultancy Accenture has gulped down cloud advisory and tech services outfit Cloud Sherpas for an undisclosed fee, signalling the start of major consolidation in this part of the market.

Privately-owned Cloud Sherpas was born in 2007 and has expanded commercially and geographically over the years via eight acquisitions including GlobalOne, WaveAdept, and Stoneburn Software Services.

The business is backed by private equity cash; it received $40m Series B financing from Greenspring Associates, Queensland Investment Corp, Columbia Capital, and Delta-V Capital in 2012. The firm is understood to have received $42.6m in debt and equity financing to date.

Accenture chief techie Paul Daugherty achieved a full house in the bingo bullshit stakes with a PR blurb issued today, talking about cloud reaching a "tipping point," being a "game changer," and becoming its preferred mechanism to sell technology services.

The deal is subject to the "satisfaction of customary closing conditions," but when signed and sealed, the circa 1,100 staff at Cloud Sherpas are "expected" to be bolted onto the newly created Accenture Cloud First Applications team.

US-headquartered Cloud Sherpas has satellite sales offices in Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, UAE, and the UK, from whence it resells services from Google, Salesforce, and ServiceNow.

Cloud Sherpas claimed to have 5,000 customers including Waitrose, Bank of Ireland, News Corp, GE Capital, AXA, Panasonic, and Kyocera.

Owners at next-gen consultancies will now be feverishly eyeing up the potential to sell the business to one of the big players, who are no doubt sitting on the sidelines to pick out suitable targets. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like