Known best for its professional services division, Accenture announced that it’s building up its own technology offerings today with the launch of the Accenture Analytics Applications Platform.
The New York-based firm says that its platform currently supports 19 different analytics applications that are industry and function-specific. The intent is to keep adding new applications, and new predictive variables to those applications, broadening the platform over time. Each application will have some rules and logic baked in to make the time between buying the technology and rendering useful visual dashboards for managers less painful for the buyers.
The software platform comes thanks to Accenture’s acquisition of i4C Analytics one year ago, says Sami Ahmed, the insight and analytics lead for Canada at Accenture Digital.
“A lot of the contextual knowledge you would need is already built into the applications,” he says. “We’re enabling the common business user to tackle sophisticated analytics problems.”
As of today, Accenture is marketing analytics applications suited for the utilities, products, telecommunications, and financial services industries. One example application, Forecaster Gas, is designed to help natural gas companies predict the daily schedules of withdrawals from their supply in order to control costs. Another application, Targeting, helps marketers create customer segments suitable for personalized messages.
Accenture’s different offerings are meant to be deployable out-of-the-box (or out of the cloud if that’s your preference, since the software is available either on-premises or as a service). But some customization will be needed for each business to tune it for their own needs, Ahmed says.
“You would definitely need a data scientist on the team who is overseeing this platform,” he says. “But the beauty of the platform is you can go from three data scientists down to one data scientist.”
Accenture’s differentiator from other analytics offerings on the market is its industry-specific expertise, Ahmed says. The applications it’s creating offer contextual knowledge that will save businesses a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to designing useful analytics applications.
The platform is available today and pricing is based on each individual’s customer’s needs and usage.