Alpha acceleration in digital transformation: The IBM-Accelalpha deal

In September 2024, IBM acquired global Oracle consultancy Accelalpha to enhance its capabilities across sectors. As ERP Today learned, the core of this three-way partnership is client success: “Our IBM-Oracle service vision is centered around building business vitality for our clients. Clearly successful companies are those that can thrive through periods of stability and uncertainty as they’ve invested in building a healthy business foundation that drives enterprise longevity,” said Corinne Koppel, Global Oracle Practice Leader, IBM during a roundtable on our platform featuring speakers from Oracle, Accelalpha and other IBM leaders.

Paul Pessutti, Senior Vice President, Finance & Supply Chain Cloud, Oracle, who sees the acquisition as a “tremendous opportunity for customers,” concurred: “[The acquisition] is the coming together of two exceptional firms where we already have strong, deep relationships and trust built up within Oracle and with our clients.”

Why the acquisition matters

With Accelalpha’s deal closing in Q4 2024, IBM has added finance and supply chain to its growing software portfolio. Moreover, the company has grown its geographic reach with Accelalpha’s team of consultants across North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America, onboarding at IBM on the completion of the deal.

Koppel noted, “We’re focused on four key geographies for growth: the Americas, the UK & Ireland, and Japan. Now, with Accelalpha, we’re able to enhance that reach across all these regions while adding focus to our key markets.”

Dan Haller, Group Vice President, Oracle, added that customers, especially in the supply chain space, who need enterprise transformations, could really benefit from the Big Blue-Big Red partnership through Accelalpha. “[We have] some strong functional supply chain capabilities, and IBM is well known as a global systems invitation partner that works with customers strategically in the industries it is focused on,” he said.

For Joe Spear, Partner at Accelalpha, the coming together of his firm and IBM is a “logical marriage of two organizations” and the capabilities they bring to each other and their commonalities.

Capabilities at the forefront

Accelalpha’s sizeable Oracle implementation capabilities include core ERP, Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), logistics and CX suites, components that “really solve core fundamental business problems for organizations we are working with around the world,” according to Spear.

He added that being at the cutting edge of the solutions it provides has always been critical to Accelalpha’s success. Now, with IBM’s capabilities added to the mix, geographies are also at the forefront.

Speaking of IBM’s capabilities, Haller noted that Big Blue’s strong managed services business was an exciting addition to the partnership. “IBM and Accelalpha can also put in the software now and implement it while managing the life cycle of that software. We’re driving AI into the applications, and we want our customers to adopt that innovation quickly, and IBM’s managed services can help do that,” he said.

Kevin Beyer, Managing Partner at Accelalpha, was also excited about bringing IBM’s managed services to Accelalpha customers for end-to-end support. “IBM is ranked as a global leader in the managed service offering, and we’re able to bring that to our customers now,” he said. “Once they’re live with the application and need it, we can bring that continuous evolution model to bear for them.”

According to Chacko Thomas, Americas Oracle Practice Leader, IBM, the acquisition builds on IBM’s existing assets such as industry benchmarks and KPIs by process area for each industry. IBM also has Smart Tools that run against a client’s Oracle database, “whether it’s IBM Business Institute (IBV), eBusiness Suite, PeopleSoft or JD Edwards, which can compare between what the industry benchmark is, where you are today, and help you analyze where you can get with Oracle,” he said.

GenAI: An exciting frontier

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is another aspect that the three organizations are excited to collaborate on. “We see the introduction of AI agents and the capabilities that are continually being released,” Spear said. “So, for us to be able to take advantage of that from a core Oracle solution perspective and then to continue to enhance that with IBM’s legacy of being on the leading edge of AI and GenAI for as long as they have, is critical.”

Giving a use case for GenAI collaboration, Thomas said that IBM’s intelligent workflows as business processes powered by emerging AI technologies come augmented on top of Oracle’s business processes, which effectively makes a quick assessment of the process. “So within 20 days, we can build out a business space and ROI,” he said. “We also have a light version that we can do in under two weeks. We are very excited to announce this because it cuts across the entire spectrum and helps customers get to the Oracle Cloud while giving them a business case with ROI.”

Beyer noted that many Accelalpha clients were looking for GenAI capabilities. Leveraging IBM’s leadership in the area while “bringing both the Oracle and IBM toolsets to our clients,” especially in the Human Capital Management (HCM) space that makes up about a third of Accelalpha’s clients, would provide additional depth and perspective.

An integrated portfolio

Still, a top-of-mind question for almost all clients of the three organizations is: Will this acquisition increase costs? Koppel pointed out: “We are keeping the teams and business models, which includes pricing and are continually striving to drive down price and deliver value.”

The acquisition also aims to strengthen and integrate the product portfolio that IBM, Accelalpha, and Oracle clients can enjoy. Whether an IBM client wants to work with Accelalpha experts on a supply chain project, or an Accelalpha client wants to add IBM’s depth of managed services capabilities to its Oracle platform, end-to-end solutions are now more integrated than ever.

As Thomas noted, “We’ve been very clear about this right from our announcement of the acquisition. We are committed to keeping the Oracle channels whole. We have committed to keeping the business model, which includes pricing and other things. In fact, Accelalpha will now have access to all of IBM’s enterprise bands, so it will only get better in terms of scale and depth.”