TechnologyOne slams Accenture

The founder of TechnologyOne has slammed Accenture and the big four consultancy firms as propagating a "highly inefficient and very poor business model" in a strongly worded blog post that also criticised third-party software integrators and application hosting providers.

Adrian Di Marco, executive chairman of the Brisbane ERP developer, was responding to a recent Australian Financial Review interview with new Accenture Australia chief executive Robert Easton.

Easton had told the AFR that the big four consultancies – PwC, KPMG, Deloitte and EY – lacked Accenture's depth of digital prowess. "I respect all of our competitors – all of them from the smallest ones through the largest ones… [but] they have nowhere near the capabilities that we have, globally."

The four consultancy giants have been expanding their technology credentials in Australian through partnerships and acquisitions, with PwC becoming a Google Apps partner; KPMG buying Brisbane's First Point Global and Hands-On Systems; Deloitte buying Dataweave, Cloud Solutions Group, Qubit Consulting and Sixtree; and EY buying analytics firms ISD and C3.

Accenture has also bolstered its software and cloud skillset with the acquisitions of Cloud Sherpas in September 2015 and more recently, Melbourne-based identity management company RedCore.

For TechnologyOne's Di Marco, all five consulting players have been found wanting. In his blog, he wrote that "recent comments by Accenture’s Australian CEO that 'the big four don’t get digital' is akin to the pot calling the kettle black".

“Accenture don’t get it either, taking software from other companies and implementing it in a highly customised fashion that results in increased costs to the customer and complicated upgrades; all of which is not viable long term and far from a new-age digital approach,” wrote Di Marco.

"Accenture, just like the other big four, continues to propagate a broken old-age business model, where the customer loses out and has no single point of accountability. The customer keeps paying for what is a highly inefficient and very poor business model."

SaaS, please

Di Marco also used his tirade to express his preference for the software-as-a-service model.

TechnologyOne solutions are widely used by councils across Australia and the company is investing heavily in SaaS. The company poured $41 million into research and development for its TechnologyOne Cloud solution in the 2015 financial year.

TechOne's cloud platform is built on Amazon Web Services; the Brisbane company was named Technology Partner of the Year at AWS Partner Summit in Sydney on 27 April.

Di Marco said "successful companies in the digital age" will opt for SaaS, "bypassing the likes of Accenture that have previously been the ‘gatekeepers’ and middlemen".

"In this SaaS model, enhancements are provided regularly as part of the service and customers benefit from industry learnings and best practices, delivered at no additional cost, direct from the SaaS vendor.

He was also critical of hosting applications on cloud infrastructure. “True SaaS vendors build the software themselves, so they are deeply committed to it, they run the software for their customers and they invest tens of millions of dollars each year in making the experience better.

“It is clearly what the cloud was always meant to be. The true beauty of SaaS is that when we enhance our solution with a new feature, all of our customers benefit from it - which is something cloud hosting providers just can’t offer.”

No fan of software resellers

Calling out the shortcomings of IT integrators and consultants is a favourite past-time for Di Marco.

Back in a 2005 post, Di Marco said that "competitors, such as SAP, Microsoft and Oracle, continue to choose to sell their services and software through a vendor/reseller model which we believe is fundamentally flawed and not suited to today’s operating environment".

In 2012, he wrote: "We believe that the model used by other software vendors of relying on third-party organisations, such as Accenture, to implement their software solutions is broken."

In 2013, he used IBM's failed Queensland Health Payroll deployment as an opportunity to say that "using third-party integrators introduces added cost and complexity, and runs the risk of implementation disasters".

Pictured: Adrian Di Marco, TechnologyOne