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Accenture has acquired Strongbow Consulting, a New Jersey firm that works with large corporations to cut their IT bills.

It’s very easy for a Fortune 500 company to accidentally overspend on technology. It might buy 1,000 Office licenses when there are only 7,00 employees who need the software, or an admin might accidently purchase a more expensive server than was originally needed.

Companies carry out periodic cost reviews to find such inefficiencies. To make such reviews more effective, a CIO can hire Strongbow Consulting to manage the workflow. 

The consultancy specializes in helping clients find cost savings across three areas: hybrid cloud environments, employee devices and the corporate network.

Strongbow Consulting also assists consulting clients with certain other IT tasks. One of those tasks is network risk reduction.

If a company’s corporate network is built the wrong way, a single malfunctioning router or switch can leave all its employees without WiFi. Companies can bring in Strongbow Consultancy to find such single points of failure in their networks and fix them.

“This acquisition reinforces and fuels our ambition of helping clients seek, find and expand value by extracting maximum utility from their technology investments,” commented Accenture exec Keith Boone. 

Accenture’s purchase of Strongbow comes about a year after it purchased another IT cost-saving consultancy called Advocate. The latter firm specialized in two areas: FinOps and TBM.

FinOps is short of financial operations. It’s a term used to describe companies’ efforts to reduce their public cloud expenses.

TBM, Advocate’s other focus area, stands for value management framework. This is the term for taking a company’s IT spending records and organizing them in a clearer manner that makes it easier to find cost inefficiencies.

After buying Advocate, Accenture turned it into a new business unit called the Tech Value practice. Strongbow Consulting will be joining the same unit.

The 60 employees that Strongbow Consulting brings with it represent a drop in the ocean for Accenture, which has more than 700,000 staffers worldwide. But the New Jersey-based firm’s cost-reduction knowledge is another matter entirely.

Accenture can take the best practices that Strongbow Consulting has developed and make them available to potentially thousands of its employees. In that respect, the acquisition of Strongbow has the potential to make a significant impact on Accenture’s portfolio consulting services. 

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