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Accenture’s latest competitor acquisition is Ocelot’s Consulting, a St. Louis-based tech consultancy with more than 100 employees.

Ocelot Consulting’s core specialty is helping companies set up and optimize AWS cloud environments. The company mainly takes on AWS projects for clients in the Midwest across the utilities, financial services, agriculture, and consumer goods sectors.

Ocelot Consulting provides the usual roster of application modernization services to companies looking to move legacy on-premises workloads to the cloud. Notably, it has also expertise in another area: AI and data science. Ocelot Consulting can set up the cloud-based software processes necessary to support a large company’s machine learning projects.

The deal is a typical Accenture acquisition. The firm, the world’s largest professional services provider by fee income, regularly picks up small rivals to extend its capabilities.

Such deals are not only about expanding the roster of Accenture’s services, or adding more depth to existing offerings, but also about market expansion. Buying a firm in a region where Accenture has a relatively limited presence can help it scale up its sales efforts more quickly than it otherwise could.

As a bonus, the companies it picks up have established client relationships that it can leverage to generate new revenue. If a small consultancy Accenture buys supports a Fortune 500 company’s IT department, Accenture can potentially use that relationship as a channel to more deals.

“Ocelot Consulting increases our talent base of multi-skilled engineers to help clients build a strong digital core—powered by cloud, data and AI—and to achieve new performance frontiers,” commented Accenture executive Andy Tay. “Cloud is the place where most technology innovation is happening, and this acquisition is all about expanding our cloud engineering skills.”

Ocelot Consulting will be merged into Accenture AWS Business Group, one of the firm’s largest units with more than 28,000 employees worldwide. Those employees are mostly engineers who about 35,000 AWS certifications. 

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