Cloud Push is Evident from the Acquisitions done by IT services Leaders

 Cloud Push is Evident from the Acquisitions done by IT services Leaders

In 2012, I had joined a company that was trying to build a business unit focused on datacenter and cloud. As the deputy general manager for the strategy in the company, I was tasked with creating a go to market strategy for the business unit. We looked into a lot of areas from colocation to hosted core banking solution, created partnerships, got certifications and started pitching in the market. All the clients listened to us intently, nodded in appreciation, agreed on efficiencies but got stuck with the security aspect. Also, it was not easy to dismantle the teams built to maintain on premises IT services infrastructure.

The tides have completely turned now and all the industries barring none have cloud on their agenda. This turnaround has taken almost a decade and has been pushed by the pandemic in no uncertain terms. One of the key aspects have also been the evolution of the cloud security and realization that may be cloud is more secure than the on premises installations. According to a study conducted by Kaspersky, around 90% [SMBs (88% ) and enterprises (91% )] of corporate data breaches in the cloud happen due to social engineering techniques targeting customers’ employees, not because of problems caused by the cloud provider.

The accelerated growth in cloud market has led to IT services providers building and ramping up their capabilities in this area. Acquisition is the the fastest way to build capabilities to tap into the the rampaging market surge. This is mostly a win-win situation for the acquirer with broader offerings and capabilities and acquired companies with very specific well-developed capabilities in niche areas.

Some of the Acquisitions in this year since Jan 2021

Acquirer	Acquired	Price	Technology Acquired for
Infosys	Simplus	US$250 million	Salesforce consulting and advisory
Infosys	GuideVision	NA	Cobalt portfolio- an umbrella offering for everything related to cloud
Infosys	Blue Acorn iCi	US$125 million	Digital customer experience
Wipro Ltd	4C	€68 million	One of the largest Salesforce partners
Wipro Ltd	Eximius Design	US$80 million	Connected products in cloud, internet of things, 5G and artificial intelligence (AI)
IBM	Taos*	NA	Strong partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure to deliver data centre migration, platform engineering and hybrid cloud managed services
Accenture	Edenhouse	NA	Independent SAP partner
Accenture	Infinity Works		Amazon Web Services and Snowflake data cloud partner
Accenture	Businet System	NA	Developer of Salesforce Commerce Cloud-based e-commerce sites in Japan
Accenture	Imaginea	NA	Cloud-native software engineering and professional services firm for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) projects
Accenture	Wolox	NA	Cloud application software developer that partners with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM and others
Accenture	Real Protect	NA	Brazilian managed security and cyber defense services company
SAP	Signavio*	NA	Cloud-native enterprise business process intelligence and management

*Proposed acquisition, not yet done. 

The acquisitions are of mid to small size. These smaller specialized firms bring in ready talent and tech capabilities that complement the existing expertise of larger companies.