Monday Morning Impact – October 10

Accenture Continues Acquisition Streak

Accenture has entered into an agreement to acquire DayNine, a global Workday consulting and deployment services provider specializing in financial management systems. The acquisition will extend Accenture’s already strong position in Workday and provide new value for clients.

“Our clients are increasingly choosing Workday to drive their cloud transformations, so we are taking this important step to meet the growing demand,” said Paul Daugherty, chief technology officer, Accenture. “DayNine is a leading exclusive Workday partner and will bring an enviable track record and impressive team that will provide our clients even greater value and business results as they transform their organizations using Workday.”

Upon completion of the acquisition, approximately 400 DayNine professionals with 1,250 Workday certifications will join the existing Accenture Workday group working within the Accenture Cloud First Applications team.

Founded in 2009, DayNine is headquartered in Pleasanton, CA and has 14 additional offices across the United States, Europe, and Asia. DayNine serves a number of verticals, including consumer goods, healthcare providers, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and communications, media and technology.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Completion of the acquisition is subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.

Channel Impact^®
This move is part of an acquisition strategy that focuses on expanding Accenture’s cloud services position. Recent acquisitions include Cloud Sherpas, New Energy Group, CRMWaypoint, Tquila UK and ClientHouse.

Deloitte Launches New Apple Practice

Apple and Deloitte have announced a partnership designed to help companies more easily adopt the iOS platform and, by extension, the iPhone and iPad. Deloitte plans to deploy more than 5,000 salespeople in the endeavor.

“We know that iOS is the best mobile platform for business because we’ve experienced the benefit ourselves with over 100,000 iOS devices in use by Deloitte’s workforce, running 75 custom apps,” said Punit Renjen, CEO of Deloitte Global. “Our dedicated Apple practice will give global businesses the expertise and resources they need to empower their mobile workforce to take advantage of the powerful ecosystem iOS, iPhone and iPad offer, and help them achieve their ambitions, while driving efficiency and productivity.”

Apple and Deloitte will also collaborate on the development of a new service offering from Deloitte Consulting called EnterpriseNext, designed to further stimulate client uptake of the iOS ecosystem of hardware, software and services.

Channel Impact^®
The move looks to assign substantial horsepower to further extend Apple’s position in the business world, which can help to stimulate Apple business for a wide variety of other partners, as well.

Fortinet Rolls Out Partner Program for its Open Security Fabric

Fortinet has launched its new Fabric-Ready Partner Program and integration of FortiSIEM, providing threat intelligence visibility across multi-vendor cybersecurity solutions.

The move is intended to open the functionality of the Fortinet’s technologies with complementary solutions from a variety of vendors, including Brocade, Carbon Black, Centrify, Nozomi Networks, Palerra, Pulse Secure, Qualys, Tufin, UBIqube, VeriSign, Inc., WhiteHat Security and Ziften.

Fortinet has developed a series of open APIs that allow integration at a number of points, including at the hypervisor, the SDN orchestration controller, in the cloud, in the sandbox to detect zero-day threats, and through logging and policy management.

As part of the program, partners have undergone solution validation with an ongoing commitment to roadmap reviews. Joint marketing and go-to-market initiatives are also planned.

“It’s clear that isolated security devices don’t solve today’s cybersecurity challenges; companies need something different,” said John Maddison, senior vice president of products and solutions at Fortinet. “They want integrated security, from IoT to the cloud, with actionable analytics across their multi-vendor networking and security solutions, all delivered through a single pane of glass view. Fortinet’s Security Fabric has delivered on this technology vision with a complete rethinking of security for customers to implement more strategic approaches, such as internal segmentation or automated universal policy to stay ahead of the threat landscape. By opening the Security Fabric to our partner ecosystem we accelerate our customers’ transition to integrated security strategies to address the full spectrum of challenges across the attack lifecycle.”

Channel Impact^®
This move is expected to lead to the development of more comprehensive security solutions while minimizing the rip-and-replace aspect commonly associated with upgrades.