Accenture’s investment ecosystem offers enterprises a bridge to the metaverse

Accenture is putting its money where its metaverse mouth is, taking strategic investments in a range of metaverse-enabling tech vendors it can partner with to offer scalable solutions the enterprise can buy into.

Accenture has called out the metaverse as one of the five forces enterprises must master to succeed in the coming decade. It has calculated the global metaverse opportunity at $1 trillion by the end of 2025.

The latest investment—a minority investment in Seattle-based Forma Vision—gives Accenture a stake in Forma’s holographic meeting platform. The platform offers face-to-face remote meetings in 3D. Using volumetric video technology, cameras record participants from every angle to create a hologram that can be streamed instantly into the metaverse, gaming environments, or other 3D worlds.

Accenture has been using Forma Vision for content production, training, and small group meetings and believes the technology is low-cost enough to find use cases in enterprises of any size. HFS is already predicting that the metaverse can reinvent how we meet and speed up decision making.

An ecosystem approach offers a shared-purpose route to new value

In line with the HFS OneEcosystem approach to building Horizon 3 organizations,  the Accenture Ventures’ Project Spotlight investment program—of which Forma Vison is part—connects emerging tech startups with Global 2000 enterprises, working with a shared purpose of creating new value. As well as offering the potential to create new value sources, Accenture benefits from filling its capability gaps while offering its investment ecosystem access to Accenture’s domain expertise and clients.

Accenture’s interest in 3D capture does not stop with Forma Vision. It sees a $180 billion opportunity in the industrial metaverse with digital twins at the heart of its strategy. Last year, Project Spotlight invested in Cintoo—a provider of solutions focused on cloud-based management and leveraging of 3D data sourced from reality capture devices. Cintoo’s platform, Cintoo Cloud, takes laser scan files and turns them into mesh-based, cloud-compatible data. The global market for digital twins alone is expected to reach $73.5 billion by 2027.

$100 million estimated stake in the future—and more to come

HFS estimates Accenture has invested in the region of $100 million in metaverse-related members of the Project Spotlight program so far, including early-stage stakes in BehaVR (digital therapeutics), Cosmo Tech (digital twins), Digital Asset Holdings (blockchain), Inrupt (personal data control), Marco Polo Networks (previously Trade IX) (supply chain), Mobeus (immersive experience through transparent computing), Strivr (training), Talespin (VR, AR, and AI), Touchcast (metaverse customer journeys), and TripleBlind (privacy controls). Investments in at least two other businesses have already been made but have not yet been made public.

These early-stage investments come on top of the acquisitions of DI Square (product lifecycle management), Entropia (experience-led full-service agency), Mackevision (CGI and 3D animation), and umlaut (advisory and engineering services). It seems the investment strategy is to acquire people (and therefore capacity) while placing early-stage bets on an ecosystem of metaverse-enabling technologies that capacity can leverage.

The Bottom Line: Investment is a reassuring indicator of intent, but enterprise leaders must judge service providers on their metaverse outcomes.

Our latest HFS Pulse data (H1 2023) shows that, on average, enterprises are only willing to score their service provider partners 6.6/10 for metaverse expertise. One-fifth of those surveyed score their provider lower than 5/10. Investments are a clear indication of intent, but enterprise leaders should continue to judge their service providers on their metaverse outcomes.