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LONDON--([ BUSINESS WIRE ])--[ Accenture ] (NYSE: ACN) is expanding its alliance relationship with salesforce.com and accelerating its market-leading position by ramping up its global workforce, enhancing its skills training and certification program, and launching new Cloud Centers of Excellence in the United States and Canada, and in the UK and France later this year. These locations will build on the already substantial capabilities of Accentureas global network of delivery centers in China, India and the Philippines.

"Accenture and salesforce.com are taking our alliance to a new level as we continue to see significant new opportunities"

Accenture also announced the opening of the Accenture Innovation Center for salesforce.com in London. The new center will serve as a showcase location for Accenture and salesforce.com to bring to life new solutions and prototypes based on innovative implementation approaches and to demonstrate the tremendous client value the two companies can jointly deliver. These announcements were made at Cloudforce London 2012.

aAccenture and salesforce.com are taking our alliance to a new level as we continue to see significant new opportunities,a said Paul Daugherty, chief technology architect at Accenture. aOver the past two years we have seen tremendous growth in our software as a service (SaaS) business. Salesforce.com represents the largest share of our SaaS business and weare seeing more cloud-enabled transformation programs in the pipeline than ever, increasingly connected to the social enterprise. As a result, we are expanding our delivery capabilities to bring innovative solutions at scale to our enterprise clients who are increasingly demanding salesforce.com apps and platforms.a

Salesforce.com has recognized Accenture as having the largest dedicated practice of any global service provider and todayas announcements are an important step for Accenture to drive even greater growth. To facilitate the planned expansion in capabilities and headcount, Accenture and salesforce.com are working together to develop a proprietary, accelerated workforce training and certification program. This new program builds on the in-house salesforce.com training capability first established by Accenture in 2009.

aAs the shift to the social enterprise continues to accelerate, our strategic partnership with Accenture is increasingly important to help customers transform themselves to thrive in this social revolution,a said George Hu, chief operating officer, salesforce.com. aSince launching our vision for the social enterprise, Accenture has become the leading provider in our largest transformational projects. In this next phase of our relationship, Accenture will rapidly scale its delivery capacity to address global demand from companies who want to become social enterprises.a

As part of this strategic relationship, the two companies will also invest in joint activities to accelerate the delivery of Salesforce solutions in the enterprise market, including:

• Closer R&D cooperation in rapidly developing areas including social collaboration, digital marketing and analytics, with direct links between salesforce.com product development teams and Accenture Technology Labs.
• Development of architecture frameworks, delivery methods and implementation tools to support increased efficiencies in the delivery of enterprise-level projects.
• Co-development of social enterprisea" vision and roadmap development capabilities, including continued support of the Accenture Enterprise Social Media Innovation Center in San Jose. At its core, Accenture is creating an experimental environment to identify, develop and test ideas and approaches that further enhance the value of the social enterprise and social collaboration technologies including Salesforce Chatter.

As evidence of its leadership, Accenture was named a leader by Forrester Research in their report: aThe Forrester Wavea": Salesforce.com Implementation, Q2 2011,a having rated Accenture against 46 levels of capability across three categories a" current offering, strategy and market presence.

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 246,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the worldas most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$25.5 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2011. Its home page is [ www.accenture.com ].

Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture. Salesforce, Cloudforce, Social Enterprise, Chatter, and salesforce.com are trademarks of salesforce.com, inc. Any third-party names, trademarks or copyrights contained in this document are the property of their respective owners.