Dive Brief:
- Accenture spent roughly $4.2 billion to bolster its cyberdefense capabilities in a trio of transactions Thursday. The professional services firm bought a majority stake in threat-detection platform Dragos and acquired device coverage and software supply chain security firms runZero and NetRise, the company said in an announcement.
- Accenture will fold NetRise and runZero into Dragos, which will function as an independent business unit led by its co-founder and CEO Robert M. Lee. The combined companies will create a unified cybersecurity platform to protect critical infrastructure, including industrial control systems, IoT, sensors and cloud-connected devices.
- The investments more than triple Accenture’s market reach in operational technology security, CEO Julie Sweet said Thursday, during a Q3 2026 earnings call for the three months ended May 31. “We're starting from a $10 billion cybersecurity services business that we've built over the last 10 years,” Sweet said. Accenture expects to close the deals in August or September, adding $208 million in annual recurring revenue.
Dive Insight:
Accenture’s cybersecurity gambit comes at a rocky time for professional services firms. AI costs are rising and the industry is shifting from time-plus-materials billing to outcome-based models.
Ongoing geopolitical instability has also taken a toll, according to Sweet, who blamed Middle East conflict for $100 million in lost revenue. Several of the firm’s managed services deals were pushed back in fiscal year 2027, she added.
Accenture’s stock prices fell by more than half in the last year, according to Investing.com historical data, despite the company growing revenues 6% year over year in U.S. dollars to $18.7 billion during the most recent quarter. However, new bookings declined 3% to $19.3 billion, with new consulting bookings decreasing by roughly $1 billion from the prior quarter.
Sweet said the trend won’t last. . “We're seeing consulting grow in a lot of these larger deals that also include managed services, and it's a direct result of our strategy that says this is not a technology play, it's a business play,” she said.
Managed services surpassed consulting revenues for the second consecutive quarter, flipping the script on what had been Accenture’s dominant segment. The realignment reflects a broader channel move to IT services, according to analyst firm Omdia, a Channel Dive sister company.
Accenture is leaning in on the shift to services with a midmarket play Sweet announced Thursday. Next week, the company will launch Accenture Edge, a consulting services offering for companies with less than $3 billion in revenue, targeting a $240 billion market.
“We see that companies in this segment face many of the same technology, data, AI, cybersecurity, and productivity challenges as large enterprises, but they often need solutions that are faster to deploy, more repeatable and right size for their scale,” Sweet said. “This segment is also an important priority for our ecosystem partners.”
A midmarket expansion will help Accenture hedge against fluctuations in its massive enterprise business, addressing a perennial pain point.
“The industry has had this challenge now for a few years on discretionary spend,” Sweet said. “Going into the midmarket in a big way is going to allow us to structurally offset the challenge on the discretionary spend for large enterprises.”
