What does it mean for the Industry?
- Consolidated vendor solutions and offerings to cover entire breadth and depth of product development process
- Product services can be offered more easily around the whole ecosystem which nurtures customers and other stakeholders
- Streamline hand-off and hand-shake between multiple processes and touch points which are critical for a successful product launch
- Enable manufacturers to have a holistic views and capabilities for their new product innovation and launches
Also, some of the key acquisitions
bring with them new thought leadership to change the product development services
offering altogether.
Accenture gains access to
highly-skilled employees in Germany, Hungary, Romania and Turkey, with deep
expertise in software development, testing, and implementation, as well as
automation and engineering solutions. These solutions also include integrated
product lifecycle management processes, embedded software, analytics and an ‘everything as a service’ delivery approach.
We are already seeing how Accenture’s
last year’s acquisitions is becoming a game
changer. Last week, Accenture announced
the formation of Accenture Product
Lifecycle Services (APLS), a new business service aimed at helping
manufacturing clients better organize, develop and manage products and
services, from ideation to retirement. They are leveraging all the 3
acquisition i.e. PCO Innovation, PRION Group and Businesses for
the APLS. However, we still have to see if Accenture acquires a CAD/CAM Engineering Services
outsourcing company.
With the merger of Kalypso and Integware, Kalypso
expands the firm’s presence in the aerospace and defense, automotive, and
energy industries in addition to life sciences, the most successful business of
Integware. The merger with DataSquare makes the European
presence for Kalypso stronger; also it adds a few resources to their Oracle
& Aras Product Development practice in Europe.
KPIT acquisition of I-Cube is an
interesting one. KPIT Cummins Infosystems is a spinoff from Cummins was
established in 1990, and became a public listed company in India in 1999. In 2013,
KPIT Cummins dropped “Cummins” from
its name and rebranded itself as KPIT.
KPIT key strengths are in the Automotive, Manufacturing and Energy &
Utilities industries.
Before I-Cubed got acquired last week by KPIT, I-Cubed itself
in March 2014, had acquired Akoya, Inc., a
Chicago-based supply chain analytics solution provider of patented analytic
software that helps manufacturers reduce product costs by identifying pricing
inefficiencies and optimizing supplier management decisions. The I-Cube
acquisition by KPIT will lift its Automotive and Manufacturing practice, as
I-Cube is one of the leading service provides for CAD/CAM data migration and
has Products, tools and accelerators that can help organizations in the Product
Development processes. KPIT also gets access to PTC & Aras partnership that
I-Cube has and will strengthen KPIT presence in North America.
There are a few Product
Development services providers that are potential targets for acquisition. However,
to be a potential acquisition target they need to have excellent Intellectual
properties, industry domain expertise, software vendor partnerships and must have
value added services. Just by relying on resources and good client base is not
going to be enough. I hope there is more great news coming in second half of
year.
