accenture

In March came the announcement of Nokia's new strategy to phase out the Symbian operating system and focus on Microsoft's Windows Phone. Now comes some of the hard reality of the change.

The Finnish phone maker announced today that it's transferring 3,000 Symbian employees to consulting firm Accenture and cutting an additional 4,000 by the end of 2012. Most of the cuts will affect employees in Denmark, Finland, and the U.K.

The cuts are necessary for the company's new focus on smartphones and "future disruptions," Chief Executive Stephen Elop said in … Read more

The initial results of pilot programs on plug-in electric vehicles may spook companies and create a vicious cycle of inefficiency when it comes to charging.

That's according to one of the topics covered in the "Changing the game: Plug-in electric vehicle pilots" report (PDF) released yesterday by technology consulting giant Accenture.

The Accenture report examined the recent data garnered from over 25 pilot programs scattered around the world that have been monitoring EVs and driver habits.

Overall the pilot programs found public charging stations have not yet been getting enough use to pay for themselves and their … Read more

Oracle, Sun's new parent, is paying out $46 million over kickback allegations that got Sun in a bit of trouble.

Levied by the U.S. government, the fine will settle claims that Sun Microsystems had paid kickbacks to technology partners such as Accenture in return for recommendations that key government agencies buy from Sun. Sun allegedly paid outside consulting companies any time one of them convinced a federal agency to purchase a Sun product or service, the Department of Justice announced yesterday.

Beyond Sun, several other tech players were caught up in the kickback allegations, including Hewlett-Packard, which was … Read more

Not only is open-source software thriving in systems management but across businesses as a whole, according to a new survey released Tuesday. A nearly 4-year-long survey of open-source systems management usage compiled by open-source software developer Zenoss showed that 98 percent of the respondents said they used open-source software in their enterprises.

These latest statistics, along with survey results from consulting firm Accenture, are further testament to the inevitability of the pervasiveness of open-source software.

What's important to note about the survey results is how both the perception and reality of open-source software has changed--users believe the software is … Read more

information technology is expected to play an important part in the global economic recovery, according to a new survey released Wednesday.

Some 72 percent of business and information technology executives say their "organizations place greater value on the IT function today than they did before the economic crisis" and that they "view IT as an important part of their economic recovery efforts," according to Accenture's Global Survey on IT Investments.

This is not an unfamiliar sentiment and is one we've heard from United States CIO Vivek Kundra as he's attempted to use IT to kick start a variety of programs on the federal level that will set the pace for innovative new uses of technology across the globe.

The results of the Accenture survey are similar to last week's Goldman Sachs cautiously optimistic survey results that suggested IT spending would trend upward in 2010 and normalize to pre-recession levels with the majority of countries represented planning to increase investment selectively next year.

… Read more

In a move that will further increase Symbian's independence from Nokia, the Finnish phone manufacturer has agreed to sell its Symbian Professional Services unit to technology consultant firm Accenture.

The unit is responsible for customer engineering and customer support for Symbian OS, the world's largest operating system for smart phones. About 165 people will be transferred to Accenture as a result of the agreement, the terms of which were not disclosed.

The transaction, announced Friday, is expected to close by the end of the third quarter, according to a press release from Nokia.

Nokia acquired Symbian last year … Read more

Even as CIOs accelerate adoption of open source in an effort to trim costs and improve innovation, the world's top system integrators (SIs) have largely played it safe on the sidelines. Accenture, given its close partnership with Microsoft, has perhaps been one of the most conservative SIs when it comes to open source.

Or so it has appeared. Despite a partnership with SpringSource, an open-source infrastructure leader, Accenture's open-source activities have largely gone unnoticed. Even Accenture's Innovation Center for Open Source, a collaboration with Red Hat and other open-source vendors, was more whispered about than promoted.

I caught up with Alex Wied, senior manager at Accenture and head of its Innovation Center for Open Source, and Tony Roby, partner in Accenture's Global Architecture and Core Technologies group, to find out what, exactly, Accenture has been doing with open source, and how the global consulting firm expects to use open source going forward. They collaborated on the answers to my questions below.

Accenture is not the first company that comes to mind when one thinks of open source. After all, you have a joint venture with Microsoft and have been pretty quiet on open source. Is open source alive and well at Accenture? If so, what are the areas of focus for Accenture?

I'm curious to find out why that is the case! Accenture has strong relationships with many leading technology companies--that is what our clients expect.

Open source is growing within both Accenture and our client base. We continue to be substantial users of open source, particularly in custom Java development, and our focus is expanding beyond this space to cover the gamut of open source portals, content management, business intelligence and data management. We also continue to contribute to open-source projects where we expect the results to benefit our clients.

Is open source client-led or Accenture-led? Meaning, are your customers asking for it or are you embracing open-source solutions for your own reasons? If so, what are those reasons? If clients are asking for it, what reasons do they cite?

It's a mixture. There is a tremendous amount of education still to be done regarding open source. We have clients who still have policies not to use open source at all; others who want to use open source wherever possible. But the majority is in between: they are open to using whatever makes most sense from a technical and commercial perspective.

What is clear is that the current economy is driving many who were ambivalent about open source to explore its potential more closely. Regardless of the economic environment, Accenture is a strong open-source advocate and will continue to work with our clients to help them achieve business benefits with it.

Is "vendor lock-in" a serious concern for your clients? If they had to choose between zero cost and 100 percent lock-in or a hefty cost and no lock-in, which would they choose? Or is that even a fair question?

Yes and no. No one wants to be locked in, particularly if that lock in results in ever-increasing expenditure that is disconnected from the value being realized.

But our clients in general look for a balance. "One throat to choke" is high up in the requirements for making major technology investments and is often prioritized over "lock-in." Also, in the context of very large projects, the cost of the software compared to everything else is frequently a small part of the equation.

Nevertheless, we are seeing a noticeable increase in the use of open source, driven largely by the "free" aspect. Few are fooled by the notion of open source being free (as in no cost): lower cost, flexibility and the ability to be supported at modest cost are key drivers of the increased uptake.

Are there particular open-source projects that are of interest to you/Accenture? Which ones, and why?

We do a lot of work with the Spring Framework, so I would say that has historically had the bulk of our interest. That said, we have people active in a number of community projects and we are making increasing use of Alfresco, Liferay, and Talend, to name a few in the technology area.… Read more

I spent some time talking with an Accenture veteran this morning, and came away with an intriguing idea: enable open-source projects to provide corporate benefits like health insurance to their developers so that they can ditch their day jobs to focus on their open-source passion.

If you've ever started a small business, you know that getting "enterprise-grade" benefits like health insurance is very difficult. At Alfresco, for example, we ultimately joined a PEO (Professional Employer Organization) called Trinet [PDF], which aggregates many smaller companies to negotiate insurance plans with companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield that would … Read more

Sometimes "free" is not so free.

I recently discovered this when a large, global system integrator (SI) deployed Alfresco Labs, our free and unsupported product, for a large client in Europe. The SI wasn't a partner of ours, and as the client soon learned when its deployment stumbled, the SI wasn't capable of providing enterprise-class support on the product. Yes, it knew the product well enough to deploy it and get paid over $50 million for its trouble, but when the deployment hit a glitch, guess to whom the SI came crawling for help?

It's not just my company. I know of another global SI that has deployed well over 100 Mule ESB instances, without buying support through MuleSource for its clients for a single one of them. If something goes wrong with those installations, the enterprise clients are going to end up paying a premium for the SI to figure out how to resolve the problems on the client's dime, never mind potential indemnification issues.

Not all SIs act like this, at least not all the time. My own company works closely with Satyam, SAIC, Booz Allen Hamilton, and others, and Accenture sells supported instances of the Spring Framework, but this is the exception to the rule for the large SIs, many of which seem happy to deploy open-source software for their clients without buying support or production-grade versions of the software.

Such SIs seem to believe that life has started raining free lunches.

This is a myopic way to do business, as the large SI in my initial example found: in that example, spending $50,000 (in the midst of a $50 million project) would have saved the SI the embarrassment and cost of trying to support a product that experience proved it didn't know nearly as well as it thought it did. The SI risked the success of a $50 million project to boost its margins by $50,000, only to find that one problem with the software ended up costing it and the client far more than $50,000.

If you're an enterprise looking for a strong SI on a project, here are a few things to consider:… Read more