Accenture Snares Gekko on Increased Cloud Appetite
Prolific acquirer Accenture is not slowing down on concerns over coronavirus, and instead making moves on the French cloud market with the acquisition of Gekko.
Cloud consultancy Gekko has 100 employees in four offices across France, and has helped some of the largest French companies migrate to the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. The deal is expected to help Accenture expand its presence in the French cloud market, strengthen its AWS expertise, and forge tighter partnerships with ecosystem partners like Amazon and Microsoft.
“Joining Accenture would be a unique opportunity to help even more organisations to leverage journey to the cloud for accelerating their digital transformations” said Gekko co-founders Roland Esnis and Julien Favre. “By combining the renowned talent, reputation and capabilities of Gekko with Accenture’s strong team of AWS practitioners in France, we would be better positioned to lead the industry in cloud services in France.”
Amid the spread of coronavirus, cloud is emerging as a clear winner. Not only is the tech now serving a more distributed workforce, but as Jeff Bezos wrote in his recent annual letter to shareholders, is also helping to crunch critical data. AWS cloud infrastructure is said to be supporting hospitals, universities, drug developers and research labs around the world in the fight against Covid-19.
While the overall pace of M&A deals has slowed as the virus spreads, the importance of cloud is still weighing heavily on IT budgets – making the sector more resilient than most, even against the prospect of a recession.
A survey from Enterprise Technology Research found that while IT spending is projected to decline by 5% in 2020, cloud giants Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform are still spending in accordance with multi-decade expansion plans. These firms are only likely to benefit from the ‘new normal’ which involves more employees than ever working from home.
For Accenture, the virus provides yet more validation for its acquisition strategy “The New”, which seeks to dig deeper into resilient sectors with the purchase of cloud, security and digital consulting agencies worldwide.