Accenture Acquires 200-Person Solution Provider To Boost Search, Content Analytics Capabilities

Accenture has purchased Search Technologies, a services company with expertise in enterprise search analytics, the company announced on Thursday.

The professional services firm, No. 2 on the CRN Solution Provider 500, said the entire 200-person team at Search Technologies will join Accenture Analytics. Within that division, Search Technology's team of engineers will work to develop solutions that help companies examine unstructured data from a variety of sources, including social media, digital, and audio-visual.

Search Technologies, headquartered in Herndon, Va., is particularly interested in use cases in the areas of e-commerce, fraud detection, health care and large corporations in the pharmaceutical, financial services and media industries.

[Related: Accenture Acquires Digital Consultancy Clearhead To Strengthen Personalization Services]

"The opportunity here is to bring Search Technologies people, their deep expertise, and their solutions together with ours to ... help us build better business outcomes for our clients," said Narendra Mulani, chief analytics officer for Accenture Analytics.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In addition to search and big data platforms, some of Search Technologies' projects incorporate machine learning technology, which can be applied in areas such as artificial intelligence-powered natural language processing.

"When you pull all these [technologies] together, we can now do some very sophisticated things to help people find and analyze information," said Kamran Khan, president and CEO of Search Technologies.

Other use cases involve marketing departments at large companies looking to dissect large amounts of data collected via digital tracking tools. Khan expects Search Technologies' expertise will expand the foothold of Accenture Analytics in the marketing services area.

Accenture will integrate those capabilities, including a proprietary content processing framework and API-level data connectors, into the Accenture Insights Platform.

Although this deal features a significant amount of client overlap, Accenture said the acquisition is complementary to its analytics business because of Search Technology's narrow expertise in content analytics.

"Talking to customers with whom we have a great relationship and tell them as a small company, we were helping them solve a narrow set of problems," Khan said. "Now we are part of an org that can come in and address the largest problem they are trying to solve, of which we've been a part."