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Accenture Announces Intent to Acquire Linkbynet, A Leading French Cloud Services Provider
Acquisition would enhance Accenture Cloud First capabilities supporting clients’ cloud migrations and business transformations.
PARIS; May 11, 2021 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has announced its intent to acquire Linkbynet, a leading French cloud services provider specializing in cloud optimization and managed services, cloud transformation and cloud security. Financial terms of the transaction are not being disclosed.
Founded in 2000, Linkbynet is a cloud-native solutions provider based in Saint-Denis, France, with additional offices in Belgium, Canada, China, France, Luxembourg, Mauritius, Singapore and Vietnam. The addition of the company’s team of more than 900 highly skilled professionals, who hold 400 certifications from major cloud providers such as Alibaba, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, would further enhance the global capabilities of Accenture Cloud First.
“Acquiring Linkbynet would be another strategic step in strengthening our Accenture Cloud First capabilities,” said Karthik Narain, global lead, Accenture Cloud First. “Linkbynet’s talented team would bring deep cloud and engineering specialization, managed services, sophisticated technology tools and cybersecurity intelligence.”
Backed by a $3 billion investment over three years, Accenture Cloud First is a multi-service group of 70,000 cloud professionals offering an unmatched depth and breadth of cloud expertise, industry cloud solutions, ecosystem partner capabilities and assets to help clients realize greater value from cloud at speed and scale.
Olivier Girard, market unit lead for Accenture France & Benelux, said, “Entire industries have been challenged to not only reinvent their customer experience, but also their core offerings, while imagining new business models for the future. With advisory and digital transformation experience across cloud implementation, security, management and optimization, the Linkbynet team brings critical skills that would help Accenture clients adopt emerging technologies and scale them across their enterprise for strategic agility in a challenging business environment.”
Patrick and Stéphane Aisenberg, co-founders of Linkbynet said, “We are proud to be one of the first French cloud-native players and a pioneer in the synergistic models between technological transformation (cloud adoption), security and cloud managed services. The combination of Accenture’s and Linkbynet’s unique working culture, values, and technical expertise would enable us to better support our customers’ digital projects across multiple sectors while providing their organizations with the same exceptional levels of service and resilience they’ve come to expect. We are excited about the opportunity to join Accenture in helping companies reimagine their business and rebuild differently for the benefit of all — from their customers and people to society at large.”
Over the past 24 months, Accenture has made a number of strategic investments to expand and enhance its cloud services capabilities. These include in France the acquisition of Gekko in June 2020 and Cirruseo in June 2019 and more recently in Europe the acquisition of Edenhouse (UK), Infinity (UK) and Cygni (Sweden).
Accenture invested nearly $1.5 billion globally on 34 acquisitions in its 2020 fiscal year to acquire critical skills and capabilities in strategic, high-growth areas of the market.
The acquisition requires prior consultation with the relevant works councils and approvals from the relevant authorities and would be subject to customary closing conditions.
