Andersen Consulting Goes Corporate with Yahoo!

In the midst of all of the holiday e-commerce bustle, giant portal Yahoo!
Inc. also tended to the enterprise side of business by signing on Andersen
Consulting to help deploy its corporate portals to small and large businesses.

Andersen will license customized corporate portal solutions from Corporate
Yahoo!™, launched last June. Based on the My Yahoo!®
interface, Corporate Yahoo! enables companies to integrate proprietary
corporate content with Yahoo!’s personalized Internet content and services
securely behind existing firewalls.

Andersen Consulting, which will be rechristened Accenture on Jan. 1, will
offer the portal in a package of knowledge management solutions to small and
large businesses that want to meet the information needs and enhance the
capabilities of their employees.

The alliance allows Andersen Consulting to bolster its Human Performance
sector while Yahoo! adds a top-tier client to its host of major li
censees.

Stephen D. Tibbs, partner at Andersen Consulting, said businesses are
frequently looking to improve collaboration and communication.

“By teaming with Yahoo!, we can offer our clients access to thousands of
content providers and personalization services, which, will enable their
employees to be more productive by giving them the best access to customized
information.”

This is the second time Yahoo! and the consulting giant have put their heads
together in the past year. The companies also inked
a contract with the North Carolina state government, in conjunction with
BellSouth, to develop NC@Your Service, a major portal that services
businesses, state employees and citizens in the state.

This gives the state such online privileges as motor vehicle registration
renewal and state fair tickets as well as Yahoo!’s local weather, mail and
calendar services.

As for Andersen, it is reinventing itself to sound less like a venture
capital firm and more like an innovator with the name Accenture, a moniker
derived from the melding of the words “accent” and “future.”

The firm is reinventing itself to become the market maker, architect and
builder of the new economy, bringing innovations to improve the way the
world works and lives. With a market cap of about $9 billion and more than
65,000 people in 48 countries, the firm is building a network of businesses
to meet the challenges of consulting, technology, outsourcing and alliances
head on.