back to article Oracle doing due diligence on Accenture. Yep, you read that right

Oracle has hired global specialists to explore the feasibility of buying multi-billion dollar consultancy Accenture, sources have told us. The database giant has engaged a team of consultants to conduct due diligence to “explore the synergies that could be created if they [Oracle] bought Accenture lock stock and barrel,” one …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: Whats this GUI thingy?

    Ha ha first comment!

    Two shitty companies joining together. What could possibly go wrong?

    1. jeffty

      Re: Whats this GUI thingy?

      You'd end up with Oracle's own version of DXC?

    2. TitterYeNot
      Coat

      Re: Whats this GUI thingy?

      "What could possibly go wrong?"

      The new company will be fine, honest.

      It's unfortunate that it'll be called 'Oral Accident' but hey...

    3. veti Silver badge

      Re: Whats this GUI thingy?

      A lot of big companies with Oracle systems need auditing.

      It'd be nice if the auditor was someone who was willing to work through an Oracle database.

      That's your synergy right there.

      1. Korev Silver badge

        Re: Whats this GUI thingy?

        But wouldn't the companies prefer someone independent to Oracle to audit their systems currently running on Oracle?

  2. IHateWearingATie
    Megaphone

    Its hard to describe just how utterly stupid this sounds.

    If they have money to waste they should give some to me. They'd certainly be better off putting it on a barge, pushing it out into the sea and setting fire to it than buying Accenture.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Mushroom

      Oracle + Accenture merger description

      > It's hard to describe just how utterly stupid this sounds.

      It was presciently described 17 years ago - in a different merger context - by Scott McNealy:

      Two garbage trucks colliding.

      I think that sums it up pretty nicely.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The world is moving...

      ... from selling stuff to selling cloudy crap, with expensive recurring fees . You need the people to convince customers. Accenture has a long experience in selling crap.

      If it happens, it will be interesting what will be of Avenade... would MS bid of Accenture too?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The world is moving...

        Yep - Avenade are probably the best part of Accenture.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The world is moving...Accenture has a long experience in selling crap.

        Even Accenture couldn't sell changing its name to Monday, though.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: The world is moving...Accenture has a long experience in selling crap.

          That wasn't Accenture, that was PwC.

          I was there and got a Monday AmEx card. Mine was coming up for renewal and I simply got a new one with Monday.

          I recall I lost it cutting some amazing Columbian marching powder....

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: The world is moving...Accenture has a long experience in selling crap.

            "That wasn't Accenture, that was PwC."

            Yes, sorry, my post was unclear. For some idiot reason I wrote "couldn't sell" instead of "didn't try".

            Oddly, my garbled post was upvoted and your correction wasn't, so I've upvoted it for you.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: The world is moving...Accenture has a long experience in selling crap.

              Thats fine :)

              Very few of us got Monday AmEx cards, mine was pure luck, as about a week later we got taken over by IBM.

    3. TheVogon

      It's not stupid - it makes perfect sense. What consultancy in their right mind would recommend anything from Oracle?! Therefore they want to buy their own consultancy...

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      It fits the now withdrawn high performance Accenture advert campaign:

      "Screw everything that moves for all it is worth".

      Pity they removed the symbol of that activity from the advert - he was very fitting.

    5. paducah1983

      you're so right

      This post made me literally LOL at my desk. And what about Avanade- that's about $2B of their annual revenue, specifically centered around Microsoft- very complicated indeed. ANd hey, @ihatewearingatie, let's spend some of that money before they set it on fire!

  3. cbars Bronze badge

    They're both literally the best

    At wasting time. If I only have to complain about one company, I suppose my life is simpler?

    1. AMBxx Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: They're both literally the best

      Maybe if Oracle then bought Capita and G4S?

      1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

        Re: They're both literally the best

        Shhhhhh. Don't go giving them ideas.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: They're both literally the best

          "Shhhhhh. Don't go giving them ideas."

          Actually I think Oracle buying Capita, G4S, Veolia and a few others would be an excellent idea. Only one corporate headquarters to nuke from orbit.

      2. TheVogon

        Re: They're both literally the best

        "Maybe if Oracle then bought Capita and G4S?"

        And maybe Sun / Java. Oh, wait...

        1. Korev Silver badge
          Coat

          Re: They're both literally the best

          And maybe Sun / Java. Oh, wait...

          That's happening on Sunday, not sure when G4Sday is though...

  4. John Latham

    Accentracle

    As in "they've really got their accentracles into us now".

    My billlion dollar invoice for branding services is in the post.

  5. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    Oh Oracle, you so meta!

    Why am I thinking about the "a match made in heaven" remark* all of a sudden?

    * For the younger readers, that's what the CEO of Mercedes-Benz said after buying Chrysler.

  6. Velv
    Childcatcher

    You do realise this is just about the yacht teams...

    1. Steve K

      So that's what all the fuss on Cloud sails is about?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Putting aside my entirely rational loathing of both companies, this doesn't make a huge amount of sense, unless there's going to be a huge shift in Oracle's strategy.

    Accenture don't have *any* products, so they're not analogous to the other recent acquisitions. All you get are their services. The "platforms" and "solutions" they market are packaged services deals.

    So what are they buying? 400,000 consultants? Only a fraction of whom have experience with Oracle products? Just doesn't make any sense at any level.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      this doesn't make a huge amount of sense

      Oh, it does, sadly it does.

      Speaking as somebody employed as a strategist for a large company that has repeatedly had its fingers burned by failed big ticket M&A (and still won't learn), I can confirm that big ticket M&A always fails in terms of shareholder value, synergies, growth etc. I can also confirm that the purpose of big ticket M&A is not to achieve those things. It is what company executives do as a distraction activity to avoid real work. You or I would do some idle web-surfing, go get a coffee and chinwag with a colleague, or simply scratch our arse and try and fart quietly. If you were a salesman on the road, you'd pad your timesheet, falsify your mileage, and go and play golf.

      In this context, consider that Oracle is Leisuresuit Larry, and secondary market shareholders count for jack shit. All the big wigs at Oracle are looking for a mongo deal to show what big movers and shakers they are, and to please Larry's impatience and pomposity. Rather than make Oracle products better, cheaper, more effective, easier to use, more secure, or roill up their sleeves and work on customer satisfaction or selling more, M&A is a welcome relief from the alternative of hard work and drudgery. They get to hang out with investment banks and VCs, to talk about "mergers of equals", mezzanine capital, convertible bonds, to talk endlessly about "due diligence" (you know, like HP did before buying Autonomy). M&A is simply a form of corporate masturbation. You try that in the office, and you'll be out before you've popped your cork. If the directors who get off on these things do their version, they'll offer themselves a golden shower of undeserved bonuses, issue self congratulatory press releases and the like. Note in particular at the end, the PR oik managed to remove his name before he left the building.

      Savvy investors will recognise that mongo-fuckwit deals like this are the high tide marks on a market, and when they appear, there is a purpose, largely as portent of doom to those able to see, as in the case of the linked press release above.

      1. CloudMonster

        Re: this doesn't make a huge amount of sense

        high tide mark indeed when you consider the other news that broke today....https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/03/introducing-amazon-connect/

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          @ CloudMonster

          You're right! The end times are upon us.

          I must admit a dark-side admiration for the utterly outrageous lie "makes it easy for non-technical users to design contact flows, manage agents, and track performance metrics – no specialized skills required".

          These people know their PHB market, and they have zero shame. Presumably Mountain View is now renamed Mountain Lair, and "do no evil" has been shorn of the superfluous "no".

        2. a pressbutton

          Re: this doesn't make a huge amount of sense

          I think you are mixing up the high tide (oracle) with the sea (amazon).

      2. Ilsa Loving

        Re: this doesn't make a huge amount of sense

        > In this context, consider that Oracle is Leisuresuit Larry, and secondary

        This little gem alone was worth an upvote, IMO.

      3. rmarkle

        Re: this doesn't make a huge amount of sense

        This is spot on. From a ground troop/customer level, it makes about zero sense. But from a corporate "Golden Parachute" perspective, this is a winner. And it has been in the works for some time: http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/2525365 , the partnership is the corporate equivalent to introducing your girlfriend to your friends. Do you even belong in the same circle?

  8. CloudMonster

    Very interesting on many levels. Accenture have a substantial and long standing relationship with salesforce, so any such merger would have an immediate and negative impact on salesforce. For the price of what Benioff was trying to flog himself to Microsoft in 2015 (https://goo.gl/tNCEaI), this could be a shrewd way for Oracle to torpedo their biggest competitor for a similar price with A> thrown in to boot.

  9. Erik4872

    An unholy match

    I fully expect the next headline to be "SAP in talks to buy CapGemini" -- it would make sense. Every big ERP vendor needs a consulting company.

    I guess the idea is that software companies are moving away from selling software and onto selling monthly revenue extraction streams. Every former OS and product vendor is doing it -- their goal is to lock you into a cloud-based management tool that they sell access to rather than sell you software to implement. It's unholy, but Oracle buying a management consultancy makes sense. IBM is trying to turn their entire company into an Accenture clone. When you wrap your product in so much complexity that you need to sell services to implement it, that's a golden combination. Oracle could easily sell a set of ERP licenses "plus, we'll throw in half the population of India for _free_ to help you run it!"

  10. Sargs
    Joke

    I can see the synergies

    Makes perfect sense to me- the two things that aggravate me the most at work are Oracle products and Accenture consultants. Combine the two, and I'll be in an early grave in half the time!

  11. Miss Lincolnshire

    Mark Turd

    It was Hurd that bought EDS and screwed it over by first taking away its solution agnosticism by going hard sell and then ripping its heart out along with all costs, be they essential or not.

    Now he's lining up to do the same to the Ruperts and Camillas. Poor souls only just got back from the ski lodge.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Mark Turd

      Whilst there's a lot to look at that Hurd screwed up royally with the EDS acquisition, this "solutions agnosticism" was and always will be complete BS. EDS almost always worked with vendors who were no threat (i.e. had little to no services/outsourcing capability). There was a reason why so many of the stacks they implemented were Dell/Sun/EMC/Cisco!

      1. Miss Lincolnshire

        Re: Mark Turd

        "Dell/Sun/EMC/Cisco!"

        Thank you for proving my point, you just forgot to add HP, Fujitsu and IBM

  12. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "If buying Accenture was a 100 metre race, Oracle is at the 10 to 15 metre stage now"

    Which still means that the race was prepared, the track put in place, the public and journalists convened, the athletes trained and gotten ready, everyone put on the starting line and the referee pointed the gun and fired the starting shot.

    A hell of a lot of activity needs to take place before a race, and it doesn't take place if the race is not supposed to reach the finish line.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "If buying Accenture was a 100 metre race, Oracle is at the 10 to 15 metre stage now"

      What they mean is that the deal is all but done, unless Accenture either don't want it AND put up an effective defence, or the token due diligence happens to reveal some unanticipated and particularly severe rot.

      All the lawyers, banks, PR flacks and other advisors are now sniffing huge deal fees, so there's nobody around the senior twerps at Oracle telling them that Emperor Larry has no clothes, just a large army of sycophants whispering "what a beautiful leisuresuit the Emperor wears! How fine the polyester! And my, it shows his imperial physique perfectly"

  13. Alistair
    Windows

    Things that make me twitch.

    "Oracle managed services"

    "Accenture consultants on <project>"

    Phrases like "needs to boost organic cloud numbers"

    There is a post not far from where I once had a *real* desk in what was once an office. It has an "Amdocs" dent. This "Amdocs" dent matches the shape of my forehead. I foresee an additional wall decoration in the near future.

  14. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

    Owner of Java buys Java consultant company

    There must be a new "Enterprise Edition" of Java coming out. Sell the problem and sell the solution.

  15. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    Oh bugger!

    My main pension's outsourced to Accenture.

  16. RichardB

    Still March, right

    Someone published early?

  17. tfewster
    Facepalm

    "Oracle and Accenture ... launched a business group"

    Every Accenture pilot I've encountered failed to scale. I expect this merger will be the same.

  18. Arctic fox
    Flame

    One of the few occasions when you will hear one of these coporate big dicks quoting Marx...

    .......is when they refer to his comment about "the creative destruction of capitalism." Unfortunately the reality is that they only get the "destruction" bit. They destroy jobs, trade and shareholder value and because of their stranglehold over the current version of capitalism they get handsomely rewarded for their destructive ego waving. It should be no surprise to anyone that sociopaths frequently choose careers in managment. In another existence Norman Bates would have been the CEO of a large Corporation rather than running a small motel.

  19. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

    Ooooooh, finally...

    Finally a opportunity for a couple of companies to swoop in and take the "we're not satisfied until you're not satisified" corporate mantra crown away from HPE and Wipro.

    1. Miss Lincolnshire

      Re: Ooooooh, finally...

      Did you miss the memo?

      HPE's mantra is '"we're not satisfied until you're just the right side of dis-satisified to see the contract out".

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "HP fatefully bought EDS and IBM acquired PWC"

    Yes HP acquired EDS but IBM did not acquire PWC. PWC spun-off their consulting business and sold-it to IBM (to become part of GBS). In fact PWC still exists today as a separate, independent company.

    1. Steve K

      Re: "HP fatefully bought EDS and IBM acquired PWC"

      separate, independent partnership and has even regrown its consultancy arm in some directions

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hard to See what the upside is for Accenture

    Oracle's products (minus DB) are the worst. Their services divisions are the worst. Having worked at Accenture, it's hard to see what the upside is. ACN does services and outsourcing, Oracle sells crappy software everyone hates. Unless it's "We'll buy ACN at Nx the share price", it's hard to see how this is a good move for Accenture. Seems to add a lot of exposure without adding value. For Oracle, it's a life preserver for drowning man, so I get that.

  22. Anonymous Coward
  23. Howard Hanek
    Linux

    Synergy

    Larry Ellison's ego is like that alien plant in 'Little Shop of Horrors'. Eventually it will swallow everything up or choke to death.

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