Just before Christmas Accenture Security announced the acquisition of French IAM system integrator Arismore, a company with about 270 employees and an estimated turnover of €40M. This makes Arismore a leading IAM system integrator in France, while also being involved in IT transformation initiatives.
The acquisition follows other deals such as the acquisition of Everett by PWC earlier in 2016.
Arismore is of specific interest because it also owns a subsidiary, Memority, which launched an IDaaS offering back in 2014. Memority is one of the various IDaaS offerings that are largely based on COTS software, but offered as a service. In contrast to some others, it was not built as a cloud service from scratch.
Anyway, such service fits into the strategy of companies such as Accenture which are moving from consultancy offerings towards service offerings, such as the Accenture Velocity platform.
The acquisition is thus another indicator of the change in the consulting and system integration market, where former SIs and consultancies are moving towards service offerings – when more and more software is used as a cloud-based service, the traditional system integration business obviously will shrink over time.
However, Memority is still only a small part of the deal. Being strong in security is another requirement of the large consultancies, with security being one of the fastest growing business areas. Thus, the acquisition of Arismore by Accenture delivers value in two areas: More services and more security.