Accenture Broadens Digital Relationship With Universal Music Group
LONDON; Dec. 7, 2010 – Accenture (NYSE:ACN) is expanding its relationship with the Universal Music Group (UMG), the world’s largest music company, following a successful, two-year collaboration to develop and deploy Accenture’s Digital Supply Chain Platform.
In broadening the relationship further, Accenture will roll out its Retail Services Platform, which uses a “hosted model” for content delivery, on a worldwide basis. This will provide UMG with an alternative means of distributing digital content to its global business partners and consumers.
Digiplug, an Accenture company, designed and built the Digital Supply Chain Platform. Its use has positioned Universal Music to capitalize on the growing digital music market by providing a flexible and automated manufacturing and distribution service. The platform interfaces with many of UMG’s business systems, and ingests all necessary audio, video, artwork and metadata before transcoding the content to meet the multiple digital specifications and delivering it to more than 750 online and mobile business partners worldwide.
This year marks the first time that UMG has fully deployed the Digital Supply Chain Platform during its peak, fourth-quarter trading period.
Boyd Muir, chief financial officer, UMG, said, “We have worked with Accenture in the digital space over the past few years and are delighted by the service, especially during our most recent ‘busy season’. On the strength of this experience, we have agreed to move forward together to expand our retail and connected based services. We are pleased to be growing our relationship further with Accenture.”
Accenture’s Retail Services Platform will enable Universal Music entities to sell content directly to fans, as well as power the technology behind various consumer-facing retail and promotional services. It is a cost-effective way to launch new music services, and provides a single, robust platform to ingest content, reduce complexity and manage costs.
“Accenture is delighted to build on its recent successes with Universal Music,” said Oday Abbosh, managing director in Accenture’s Media & Entertainment industry group, “The opportunity to grow our hosted retail services with UMG on a worldwide basis is a testament to the deep knowledge developed and innovative solutions built at Digiplug. We are excited about broadening our relationship with the world’s largest music company.”
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About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 204,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$21.6 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2010. Its home page is www.accenture.com.
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