Accenture plc ACN announced yesterday that it has entered into an agreement to acquire independent data consulting and engineering company Sentelis. Financial terms of the deal have been kept under wraps.
Founded in 2011, France-based Sentelis engages in designing data and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. The company, with its more than 50 skilled employees that include data and AI advisors, engineers, and architects, will join Accenture Applied Intelligence.
Notably, Accenture’s shares have gained 26.7% over the past three months, outperforming the 24.8% rally of the industry it belongs to.
How Will Accenture Benefit?
Accenture expects that Sentelis’s industry experience in financial services and retail, combined with its own AI and machine learning engineering expertise, will enable it to develop and deliver highly differentiated end-to-end services to the European market. The buyout is expected to boost Accenture’s analytics, AI and ML/data engineering business, particularly in France.
“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," said Athina Kanioura, chief analytics officer and global lead for Accenture Applied Intelligence.
Some other recent AI-oriented acquisitions of Accenture include Mudano in the UK, Byte Prophecy in India, Analytics8 in Australia, Clarity Insights in North America and Pragsis Bidoop in Spain.
Zacks Rank & Key Picks
Accenture currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).
Some better-ranked stocks in the broader Zacks Business Services sector are DocuSign DOCU, Elastic N.V. ESTC and SailPoint Technologies SAIL. All the stocks carry a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
The long-term expected earnings per share (three to five years) growth rate for DocuSign, Elastic N.V. and SailPoint are at 31.2%, 26% and 15%, respectively.
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Sourced From Zacks Equity Research