Dive Brief:
- Accenture is prepared to commit $5 billion to acquisitions over the next year, the IT consulting and services firm’s CEO Julie Sweet said Thursday, during a Q4 2026 earnings call for the three months ended Aug. 31.
- The company invested $1.9 billion in M&A during the final quarter of its fiscal year, excluding $3 billion in capital related to three cybersecurity platform investments, Sweet said. While the acquisition of software supply chain security platform NetRise closed in August, Accenture’s deals to buy a majority stake in operational security platform Dragos and acquire a surface management platform weren’t finalized until last month.
- “We see significant opportunities in the market through acquisitions to … grow in really high growth areas like data and AI, and to expand into new areas,” Sweet said. “We go after them because that's how you position for long-term growth.”
Dive Insight:
The tech industry’s largest global systems integrator remains committed to aggressive M&A. It’s a strategy that has expanded Accenture’s technical capabilities and rewarded investors.
The company increased Q4 and fiscal year revenues 6% year over year to $18.7 and $74.2 billion, split nearly evenly between managed services and consulting. Net new bookings for the company grew 4% to $22.2 billion in the recent quarter, during which the firm launched a midmarket business unit called Accenture Edge.
The new division was forged from parts of several key acquisitions, including Oracle Cloud services firm Inspirage, which brought Accenture Edge CEO Srini Subramanian to the company.
Accenture closed three deals in its most recent quarter, acquiring network intelligence provider Ookla, digital-content platform Whalar and Tokyo-based midmarket software services firm Comware.
The company also inked a deal to add Dutch SAP specialist McCoy to the Accenture Edge team and agreed to acquire supply chain engineering firm Industries eXcellence Group, a longtime Siemens Digital Industries partner. Both deals were announced in Accenture’s Q4 and remain subject to customary closing processes.
The company has bought 201 since 2015, averaging eighteen a year, according to investment management firm Adventis Advisors. Accenture claims more than 140 acquisitions in the last four years.
Sweet said M&A has shored up Accenture’s core GSI business and opened new markets such as data centers. She pointed to Accenture’s majority stake in AI data center engineering and consulting firm DLB Associates, announced in December.
“If we scale inorganically, it's going to drive more organic growth because we can do it faster,” Sweet said. “But we also use [M&A] to expand into these areas that start small and then grow.”
