In the last post, we talked about Dell-Perot - A product company acquiring a Service entity to expand its reach. In this post, I wanted to highlight another interesting combination - An IT Service company investing in a hardware product company. Curious to know more?. Read on..
Accenture invests in a product company called Bug Labs. Yes, the company is teaming up with a tiny hardware product manufacturing company called Bug Labs. It is a move away from Accenture's conventional business model.
In a nutshell, Bug Labs provides a base [open-source] hardware module that can be enhanced to build a whole new device by adding other hardware add-ons such as accelerometer, GPS and GPRS connector and so on. Reminds me of another similar open source hardware company called Chumby, that I read about couple of years ago.
Once you have your own custom built hardware device, you can deploy your own business applications on top of the device in as little as two days. The advantage is that the device can be completely tailor-made for a target company and can be a great value add in rapid prototyping of new products/services.
Accenture is also planning to charge its customers based on pay-per-use of its underlying software services instead of selling the product. Do visit the BugLabs site, you will see a new ecosystems of devices and applications emerging.
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