This definitely wasn't in my 2024 bingo card.
What does Accenture (or for that matter Udacity) have to gain from this acquisition?
What does Accenture (or for that matter Udacity) have to gain from this acquisition?
Much of their model is hiring entry-level to junior resources, upskill them, bill them out to clients at high mark-ups. Many parts of the workforce follow an up-or-out mentality and technical/functional upskilling is a key component to this, rather than just tenure.
Purchasing a platform to train that many people is probably a bargain compared to what they are probably doing now -- letting everyone choose their own platform and reimbursing the retail cost.
It is definitely a bargain compared to what they did when I worked there -- they owned and operated an entire University-like campus called "St. Charles Illinois" and flew people in from all over the world.
I presume Accenture still has to invest the course content that is specific for them, and then use Udacity as the distribution platform. Why couldn't they do that before just like all the universities that uploaded their courses to Udacity?
The closest one of these companies has gotten to profitable is Udemy via their business segment.
St. Charles will still exist for the vertical, and for the chosen horizontal. An acquisition like this is for the horizontal and once internalised sufficiently to sell to clients, the selling the product not any individual training course which are pretty fungible. Online corporate in-house training's been lagging consumer bells-and-whistles for a decade, it'll be a flashier-better product than current competition.
There could also be a trojan horse play to see what companies are training their employees on so as to offer competitive managed services around it.
Accenture's core competency is getting governments (and large companies) to hand over large sums of money. Seems like a good fit.