Accenture sets up Oracle CoE in Bangalore

BANGALORE: Global IT services major Accenture has set up its first and only global Center of Excellence (CoE) dedicated to its
Oracle practice at its campus here.



Speaking to CyberMedia News, James E Hayes, partner and head of Accenture's worldwide Oracle practice, said that the CoE would build complete Oracle based solutions for Accenture, which would be implemented at client sites.



Tracing the trends that motivated the company to open the center, he said enterprises were looking to get more value out of their ERP deployments.



"They want to leverage on the huge terabytes of data and use it to add value to their business processes."



He added that the Bangalore center offered the advantage of employees armed with not just technology expertise but also business processing and configuration skills.

The new CoE will also use service-oriented architectures
(SOA) to design and build solutions based on Oracle's latest technologies, including the Oracle Applications Framework.



Accenture's Oracle practice, which is vertical-inclined, focuses on three major industry segments-retail, health and life science and telecom.



"We believe that vertical solutions are the way to go since our thought leadership in specific domains coupled with Oracle technology offer a compelling value proposition to our customers."



Around 18,600 employees or 14 percent of the company's worldwide employee base consists of Oracle skilled professionals.



Though Accenture did not divulge details of the number of Oracle business employees at Accenture India, Vinay Prabhakar, senior VP, Accenture, said that "the cream of the practice" would be based in India.



The company has tripled the number of hires in its Oracle practice over the last three years and intends to continue expanding.



Prabhakar said that the Indian team would work on tools, which would reduce time to delivery, on a portfolio of tools to automate business processes and diagnostic tools.



Hayes said that Accenture has signed a special agreement called a "master alliance" with Oracle where the latter is closely involved with Accenture and has also laid out a framework for developing IP solutions.



The company has developed its own tools for auto-configuration, billing and customer contact (in the telecom space), stock management (retail segment) and an executive dashboard that can summarize transactional data.