Accenture Takes Aim At Canadian SaaS Opportunity With ServiceNow Partner Acquisition

Accenture is ramping up its ServiceNow capabilities in North America, scooping up Alberta consulting firm Nashco in response to the emerging prominence of the "as-a-service" model in Canada.

Accenture offers ServiceNow, the cloud-based workflow and automation platform, as a managed service to help companies automate their businesses and become more efficient. Terms of the Nashco deal were not disclosed.

’We are seeing the market growing quite quickly in Canada … we are finding that customers in that geography are starting to embrace that as-a-service model and ServiceNow is a significant and relevant tool in that journey,’ Jason Wojahn, Managing Director and Global ServiceNow Lead for Accenture said in an interview with CRN.

[Related: Accenture Buys International Consultancy To Help Banks Build Digital Capabilities]

"Companies are always looking for more ways to be efficient and companies in Canada are no exception … This was just the right time, the right partner, and the right market conditions to be a complimentary mix," he said.

The acquisition brings 25 certified ServiceNow specialists into Accenture’s team of 800 certified specialists and 1,500 practitioners dedicated to the ServiceNow platform, further strengthening Accenture’s position as one of the top partners in the ServiceNow ecosystem.

Following the acquisition, which closed Wednesday morning, Nashco was tucked into Accenture’s global ServiceNow practice. "We are already working through the integration plans and expect to have the integration completed by February," Wojahn said, noting that the acquisition is "purely additive," to Accenture’s North American ServiceNow operations.

Nashco was founded in 1993 and has been exclusively focused on ServiceNow's IT service management suite since 2008. That focus has allowed it to become the leading ServiceNow partner in the Canadian market, the company said.

"This moves us to the top position in Canada … and that is part of our mission across the globe, to provide the highest quality services in ServiceNow possible to embrace the emerging as-a-service economy across every geography we occupy," Wojahn said.

This acquisition builds on top of Accenture’s October 2015 purchase of Cloud Sherpas, Accenture’s largest ServiceNow acquisition to date.

At that time, Dublin-based Accenture, No. 2 on the 2016 CRN SP500, added than 1,100 of Cloud Sherpa’s employees to it’s Cloud First Applications team. The CloudFirst team is now Accenture's ServiceNow practice.

Several of Accenture's this year have targeted security, vertical practices and growing the company's capabilities around its ability to deliver cloud applications and support "as-a-service" business model for its customers.