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Accenture team up with RBS 6 Nations

25 January 2012

The RBS 6 Nations today announced Accenture as its Official Technology Partner for the 2012 & 2013 RBS 6 Nations Rugby Championships. As the Technology Partner, Accenture is delivering the official RBS 6 Nations Championship mobile app. The app is available free today in the App Store for iPhone, providing RBS 6 Nations fans with access to team news, stats, video highlights and up-to-the-minute scores throughout the Championship. John Feehan, Chief Executive of the RBS 6 Nations, said: “Through a collaborative contract with Accenture we have been able to deliver the new mobile app ahead of this year’s first Championship game on Saturday 4 February between France and Italy. The app will provide broadcasters, journalists, coaches and rugby fans with the latest news such as team line ups and live text commentary throughout the Championship. We look forward to a very productive and successful relationship with Accenture.”

During the Championship, users of the app will be able to access comprehensive match statistics and live text commentary for all matches, capturing critical team, player and match data such as set piece success rates, yards gained, possession rates, penalty counts and a host of other match metrics. "Accenture is delighted to be associated with one of the most exciting rugby tournaments in the world," said Olly Benzecry, U.K. and Ireland managing director at Accenture. "We pride ourselves on our ability to develop innovative mobile capabilities for our clients. In this case, Accenture Mobility Services was tapped to help The RBS 6 Nations respond to the needs of its changing consumers and to enhance the experience of rugby fans." Incorporating the latest technology to create the ultimate mobile RBS 6 Nations fan experience, the Accenture-built app provides fans with access to all kinds of information throughout the championship, with live push notifications to keep users up to date on the latest pre-match developments as they happen. The app covers the whole experience both on and off the field from pre-match build up with all the latest news, line ups and previews, through to experiencing the game live with text commentary, followed by post match analysis including video highlights, reports and match play data.

From the outside looking in, it appears that Microsoft has indeed turned the corner. The company recently added two open source platforms to Windows Azure — its new-age web service for building and hosting applications on the net - and it’s actually contributing open source code to these projects - as well as others. These aren't minor open source projects. They're big name projects with huge followings: Node.js and Hadoop. This would not have happened in the past. Microsoft changed because of people like Sam Ramji and the man who hired him, Bill Hilf - not to mention Bill Gates. But the change also reflects a much larger movement across the tech industry. As more and more applications move from local data centers to "cloud" services such as Amazon Web Services and, yes, Microsoft Azure, the economics of software are shifting. In the past, businesses paid companies like Microsoft for software and loaded it on their own servers. Now, businesses pay to use online services instead. In offering open source software atop Azure, there’s a clear way for Microsoft to actually make money. "With Azure, we make money from compute and storage and bandwidth," says Hilf, who now oversees Azure. "We want to offer as many types of applications and as many types of systems as we can, so they can help that flywheel spin…. We don’t see [Node.js] on Azure as altruistic. We see it as a way to drive business."

www.rbs6nations.com/en/19838.php