Application Outsourcing: South Africa

We deliver innovative application outsourcing solutions to help our clients achieve high performance.

Over the past 15 years, Accenture has helped many of the world's leading organisations use application outsourcing to address critical business imperatives and enhance performance.

Some of the benefits of working with Accenture to outsource applications are:

• Improve application development and support productivity.
• Reduce total cost of application ownership.
• Improve process quality: leading process certifications.
• Improve service execution: 90-plus percent achievement of critical service level agreements.
• Achieve reliable delivery: 90-plus percent on time and on budget.
• Re-engineer business processes to operate at "best-in-class" levels.
• Gain greater management control of investments in application development and maintenance.
• Rationalise the application portfolio and underlying infrastructure.
• Refresh technology platforms.
• Implement variable and scalable staffing based on business need.
• Acquire access to highly specialised skills.

Accenture provides a flexible spectrum of application outsourcing services—managing custom or packaged software applications over their complete development and maintenance life cycles.

The results? Accenture's innovative approach goes far beyond a focus on cost reduction. We help organisations master IT, align their IT investments with strategic business imperatives and so progress along the road to high performance.

Related Research and Insights:

Read Forrester's 2007 research examining the capabilities of competing vendors in the applications outsourcing market in North America.

For South African companies competing for their home markets and assessing international opportunities, Accenture offers the best of both worlds: a strong local partner who understands this market—plus access to global best practices and Accenture's formidable intellectual capital around the globe.

Accenture has developed the methodologies and toolsets to ensure that outsourcing delivers the benefits required and helps organisations to achieve their performance goals. We also leverage the Accenture Delivery Suite for Outsourcing to ensure maximum efficiencies and impact.

The result is greater operational control with better reporting and a higher rate of on-time, on-budget project delivery. Companies gain the flexibility of being able to refocus retained employees on critical business imperatives and adjust outsourcing service levels to meet changing business needs. The overall business outcome is realising increased value and lower costs through improved performance.

Client Successes:

Edcon—the most significant IT application outsourcing arrangement in the South African retail industry.

We offer a wide spectrum of services and flexible arrangements under our Application Outsourcing umbrella. Here are a few examples of the services we offer to help your business or government agency achieve high performance:

Following are some of the specific Application Outsourcing services we offer as well:

• Application management—Accenture provides ongoing support of an existing set of applications.
  
  
• Application outsourcing capacity services—Accenture provides IT professionals to support development, testing and/or maintenance activities.
  
  
• Application testing—Accenture provides application testing execution and management services.
  
  
• Application management for leading enterprise-wide software programs—Accenture provides ongoing support for specific enterprise-wide software platforms including SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and Siebel.
  
  
• Comprehensive application development/management—Accenture provides a full scope of development, implementation and ongoing management services for new and existing applications and a comprehensive application portfolio.
  
  
• Design, build, run—Accenture provides industry-specific solutions and ongoing "run" support of the associated applications.

We frequently bundle Application Outsourcing with our other outsourcing services. Some examples include:

• Application outsourcing bundled with business process outsourcing—In conjunction with our market-leading BPO business, we include application outsourcing for related business systems.
  
  
• Application outsourcing bundled with infrastructure outsourcing—Accenture assumes responsibility for the full transformation and long-term management of the client's IT applications, infrastructure and operations.