HFS Highlight: Accenture acquires Byte Prophecy to show its clients the KPI impact of their data, analytics and AI capabilities

Accenture acquired Byte Prophecy, an automated insights and big data analytics company based in Ahmedabad, India.  Byte Prophecy offers a platform–based solution, MonitorFirst that provides data visibility, delivers automated insights, and executes optimal planning. 

As a part of the acquisition, 50 data science and data engineering experts of Byte Prophecy will join the Accenture Applied Intelligence team. The startup has already worked closely with Accenture Ventures since 2018 on open innovation efforts, collaborating with Accenture and its clients in the Asia Pacific region on advanced data and analytics projects. 

MonitorFirst could integrate well with Accenture’s Applied Intelligence portfolio 

Accenture Applied Intelligence includes analytics and AI–related capabilities, solutions, and services. We believe that Accenture can leverage the capabilities of Byte Prophecy for their analytics and AI-augmented solutions, SynOps, and AIP+. Integrating MonitorFirst applications, Accenture SynOps can be an end-to-end supply chain management solution as described in Exhibit 1. The detailed synergy analysis of the two tools is described in Exhibit 2. 

Exhibit 1: Together SynOps and MonitorFirst can provide a full–stack supply chain management solution 

Source: HFS Research 2020 

Exhibit 2: MonitorFirst adds the critical pieces of supply chain management in SynOps – Inventory management, Operations, and Logistics 

Source: HFS Research 2020 

MonitorFirst also complements the tenets of AIP+ that leverages AI across enterprise business functions with adaptable, modular components designed to help deliver results and scale quickly as described in Exhibit 3. Since MonitorFirst uses KPI based automated insights across sectors, it enables enterprises for better planning and alignment across their data initiatives. Many of these specific use-case solutions of MonitorFirst can be packaged as plug and play solutions and included as a part of AIP+. 

Exhibit 3: Like AIP+, MonitorFirst also prioritizes speed for building, deploying, and extracting insights  

Source: HFS Research 2020 

Bottom Line: Data, analytics, and AI initiatives need to tie better into key operational KPIs and actions. MonitorFirst will better enable Accenture to make this connection for its clients. 

In our view, MonitorFirst’s KPI Store and rapid insights are compelling features where Accenture can really benefit. Byte Prophecy’s technology has mapped over 1000 KPIs across multiple industries, calculating parameters such as customer, channel, and product KPIs. Ideally, any analytics or AI intervention needs to address these metrics, and provide ways in which to take action to improve the impact. With the way that process mining is evolving as an analytics discipline, we expect this linkage between planning and operations to become even more pronounced for analytics engagements in the next few years.