Accenture Wins U.S. Air Force Training and Simulation Research Contract

Information systems based on service-oriented architecture approach will enhance war fighter training

WASHINGTON; Oct. 29, 2008 – The U.S. Air Force’s (USAF) Electronic Systems Center, Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., has awarded Accenture (NYSE: ACN) a three-year, $22.18 million contract to expand existing services and prototype advanced modeling and simulation technology for the war fighter.

Accenture is the prime contractor for the Air Force Modeling and Simulation Training Toolkit, a suite of simulation systems, game applications and related tools that help train Air Force teams to execute air missions. Under the new research contract, Accenture will expand services and capabilities so that the Air Force can leverage live, virtual and constructive modeling and simulation tools across a variety of domains and environments.

“The need to integrate and leverage information-rich decision support and simulation systems across federal civilian and defense agencies continues to grow,” said Eric Stange, managing director of Accenture’s U.S. Defense practice. “Capitalizing on the experience and leading-edge practices of the commercial marketplace can help government agencies improve the integration and interoperability of joint proprietary systems.”

The ever-changing global security environment puts increased interoperability and flexibility demands on the federal government’s information systems – in particular, the Department of Defense’s (DoD) command/control/communications/computers and intelligence (known as C4I) systems and its modeling and simulation (M&S) systems.

With Accenture’s help, the USAF will be able to meet those demands, which include the ability to:

• rapidly compose training environments with a minimum of personnel for simultaneous worldwide events;
• integrate new services and components into the network environment without impeding operations;
• use M&S in the Global Information Grid (DoD’s communications project), including compliance with security requirements;
• use M&S to provide operational decision support and to perform joint mission rehearsals;
• evaluate and prototype the migration of existing simulations to the net-centric environment; and
• support data services standards evolution for training and simulation systems.

To help the USAF achieve those goals, Accenture will draw on its global systems integration consulting work in service-oriented architecture (SOA)* based solutions together with its comprehensive knowledge of war-fighter needs to help the USAF realign its technology and management approaches and transition its M&S operations to a net-centric environment.

“The Air Force could reduce much of the cost and effort associated with traditional simulation by using service-oriented architecture technologies for M&S and command and control exercises,” Stange said. “We’re focused on reducing the overhead associated with events, so that the quantity and complexity of ‘distributed events’ can grow exponentially.”

A significant increase in events and testing can lead to greater system stability and enable joint mission rehearsals to occur on an ad hoc basis, without the timely and expensive coordination previously required for such rehearsals.

*SOA is a services-based approach for designing and building flexible IT solutions, easily combining legacy and new technologies. It enables business process components to be assembled and orchestrated efficiently and rapidly, giving businesses the agility to respond to changing business conditions and delivering distinctive business services. For internal IT organizations, it enables simpler systems that are cheaper to run, can be modified easily and integrate better with other platforms.

About Accenture Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. 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. With more than 186,000 people in 49 countries, the company generated net revenues of US$23.39 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2008. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

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Contact: Lisa Meyer
Accenture
+1-703-947-3846
lisa.m.meyer@accenture.com