This week I talked to Jim Adamczyk and Tomas Nystrom of Accenture about how the company’s software-as-a-service and open source strategies. Adamczyk is CTO of Accenture Software and Nystrom is the Accenture global lead for open source. Together they explained the interwoven nature of these two technology trends and how Accenture is adapting.

The key here is that Accenture is creating more of its own intellectual property, though Adamczyk is quick to point out that A) Accenture, as a company, has always had a strategy of creating IP and B) Accenture only own the IP that it creates on its own time on its own money, or has acquired from another company. Its customers still own IP that Accenture was hired to create for them.

That said, Accenture is moving towards building more of its own software solutions, some of it delivered as a SaaS and some of it even released as open source. Accenture has recently taken over development of the Symbian smart phone operating system. It’s also purchasing more IP related niche verticals like property and casualty insurance by acquiring companies like Duck Creek, which supports the claims management SaaS Accenture offers.

As mentioned, Accenture is also contributing to more open source software. Nystrom says the company is mostly contributing small patches to well established open source projects – it’s very difficult to build a new community. In many cases it’s just a matter of being a good open source citizen. But the company did open source its Spring Batch framework, one of the very few batch frameworks for Java, back in 2008. Spring is a well established open source project, but this is a major contribution.

So how does Accenture decide what to build, and when to open source the software that it builds? “We want to make money from IP and make it a differentiator,” says Adamczyk. “IP becomes valuable for us when it becomes valuable for a customer.” He says that if there a piece of software is essentially a commodity, that it provides no particular competitive advantage for Accenture or its clients, then it could be open sourced. But, as Nystrom points out, if there’s community demand for it. Accenture builds some very niche technology, and it only makes sense for it to productize technology that will provide value to multiple customers (such as claims management technology). Developer tools are a great example of something that Accenture can open source, that provides value to the open source community but doesn’t necessarily give Accenture a competitive advantage.

“The move towards software is a move to consolidate the best parts of Accenture when our clients want that,” says Adamczyk “SaaS is a logical extension of providing that one package – customization, maintenance, etc.”

This is one response to the rise of the cloud and open source, two forces remaking IT and software development. We’ve also looked at out the analyst firm RedMonk is productizing its services to adapt to the changing technology landscape. We’ll be looking at more examples of these trends in the future.