Accenture backs Beamery; IBM closes Turbonomic acquisition

Global technology company Accenture and Armonk, New York based IBM have announced two separate strategic deals. 

Accenture said on Thursday that its corporate venture capital arm Accenture Ventures has invested an undisclosed amount in Beamery, a London-based startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help global companies attract, engage and retain top talent.  

The company participated in Beamery’s $138 million worth Series C round, led by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board. 

As part of this investment, Accenture said, the AI startup will become a part of Project Spotlight, an exclusive Accenture Venture program that offers unprecedented access to the technology giant’s expertise and enterprise clients. 

It will work with subject matter experts at Accenture Innovation Hubs, Labs and Liquid Studios to adapt its solutions to the enterprise market and scale faster and more effectively.  

The solutions will then be taken to Accenture’s global clientele. 

Commenting on the engagement, Tom Lounibos, managing director at Accenture Ventures, said, “Our investment in Beamery aligns with Accenture Ventures’ commitment to cultivate the latest technologies, enhanced by human ingenuity, that solve for our clients’ most important challenges.” 

“Beamery will help our clients by adding efficiency to their talent recruitment, hiring and retaining process,” he added. Last year alone, the startup filled over one million roles using its technology. 

In a separate development, technology giant IBM announced the closing of its acquisition of Turbonomic, a Boston based application resource management (ARM) and network performance management (NPM) software provider. 

The deal, announced late April, complements IBM's recent acquisition of Instana for application performance monitoring (APM) and observability, and the launch of IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps to automate IT operations using artificial intelligence.   

According to the technology giant, with the integration of Turbonomic ARM with Instana's APM capabilities, customers will be able to automate actions to optimize their underlying IT infrastructure and assure performance across applications running in complex hybrid cloud environments. 

"IBM is already helping thousands of customers use automation to make IT and business processes more efficient and employees more effective. Now that Turbonomic is a part of our portfolio, IBM is the only company providing a one-stop shop of AI-powered automation capabilities, all built on Red Hat OpenShift to run anywhere,” Dinesh Nirmal, General Manager at IBM Automation, said. 

The company will also leverage Turbonomic's NPM products and strong presence in the telecommunications industry to complement its own offerings and help customers intelligently optimize applications running in 5G environments.