Accenture puts millions into industry-specific services
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/1/2006 12:00:00 AM
Paving the road to service-oriented architecture (SOA) takes commitment and money, which is why New York-based Accenture is committing $450 million over the next three years to help its clients realize the benefits of the new technology.
“The objective of the investment is threefold,” says David Nichols, executive partner and global lead for Accenture's SOA practice. “The first is to build an unmatched core competency for all our practitioners. The second is to build industry-specific solutions, and the third is to take a futuristic look at building systems and services,” which will be embodied in a new Accenture Technology Lab for SOA Innovation, he says.
The lab will accelerate development of new tools and methods for reshaping legacy systems into reusable services that can be easily assembled into new applications. These new tools include domain-specific language coupled with model-driven development to automatically generate code.
The lab will identify and address problems with—and barriers to—SOA development before solutions are commercialized. “We expect to learn where the shortages and gaps in the technology are in a safe environment,” says Nichols.
The overall initiative also includes a blueprint for SOA implementation, including the four levels of maturity in SOA adoption, and eight targeted service offerings based on work with clients over the last 18 months.
Says Nichols, “These bundled offerings include organization and governance—for example, frameworks we use to help clients organize their companies properly, identifying linkages between IT and business functions.”
