Accenture announces intent to acquire Sentelis

PARIS; June 15, 2020 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has entered into an agreement to acquire Sentelis, an independent data consulting and engineering company, headquartered in France, that specializes in designing and scaling data and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. Sentelis would join Accenture Applied Intelligence and complement its focus on helping clients build the right data strategy and foundation to industrialize AI across their businesses.

With a strong focus on industrializing AI and big data technologies, Sentelis has more than 50 highly skilled professionals, including data and AI advisors, architects and engineers. Since its founding in 2011, Sentelis has helped numerous clients, including some of the largest French companies, architect, engineer and scale adapted and secure data-centric architecture, enabling them to accelerate business innovation.

The combination of Sentelis’s industry experience, particularly in financial services and retail, with Accenture’s expertise in global large-scale artificial intelligence and machine learning engineering initiatives would provide highly differentiated end-to-end services to the European market.

“The addition of the strong technical talent of Sentelis’s teams, combined with our AI and big data solutions, and deep industry expertise, would be a major opportunity to strengthen and broaden our ability to help clients scale AI across their businesses,” said Olivier Girard, market unit lead, Accenture France and Benelux. “In addition to organically growing talent, Accenture’s strategic approach to acquisitions is designed to ensure the right capabilities are in place to meet existing, as well as emerging, client needs with speed and scale. Together, we would be able to help a broader range of clients industrialize innovation in data strategy and AI.”

“Our research shows that a strong data foundation underpins an organization’s ability to successfully scale AI,” said Athina Kanioura, chief analytics officer and global lead for Accenture Applied Intelligence. “Strategic acquisitions — like Sentelis — are bringing greater capacity and enhanced capabilities to our data and AI client work. Sentelis’s data strategy, architecture and engineering skills align seamlessly with Accenture’s focus on industrialized, end-to-end solutions. With the addition of Sentelis, we would see even greater opportunity to accelerate how our clients gain value from data and AI across their business.”

“Today, smart businesses are adopting and pursuing digital transformation to balance innovation and industrialization at scale, and to allow their organizations to be seamlessly integrated with the wider ecosystem. To create an intelligent enterprise, it must be built around a mix of digital platforms, with data and AI at its core,” said Isabelle Regnier and Jean-Baptiste Ceccaldi, respectively executive director and president of Sentelis. “This is why, in today’s growing data-driven market, joining Accenture would be a unique opportunity to enlarge our approach to new sectors and help more organizations to leverage their information systems to accelerate their digital transformations.”

This acquisition would strengthen Accenture’s growing analytics, AI and ML/data engineering business in France. Global growth in AI client engagements has also served as a driver for Accenture’s recent acquisitions of Analytics8 in Australia, Pragsis Bidoop in Spain, Clarity Insights in North America, Mudano in the UK and Byte Prophecy in India.

The acquisition requires prior consultation with the relevant works councils and would be subject to customary closing conditions. Financial terms of the transaction are not being disclosed.