Acceleration: web expertise

One of the things that is most striking about development on the web is how very fragmented everything is, people are experts in very narrow bits, and to assemble a working site of good quality requires an ad-hoc team to be assembled. It is therefore very exciting to find an established one-stop shop of proven capability. Acceleration are a long established end to end web solution provider with 8 years of providing technology, people and processes to provide people with solutions to market themselves effectively over the Internet.

Acceleration has over 200 customers worldwide, focussed predominately on publishers, agencies and marketers, but these are across a broad spectrum of industries. They employ over 80 people in their main bases of the USA, UK and their development centre based in South Africa. This profile is important because it enables them to combine a low cost development base with English speaking and, importantly, a questioning culture suited to operating in both the US and Europe. Their success means that they have been recognised as one of the fastest growing companies in the USA at present.

Their development centre enables them to leverage their major partnerships with Omniture, Epsilon and DoubleClick, and provides them with the basis of being in their fourth year of double digit growth, and is allowing them to expand their intellectual property, making them really stand out in this market. They already have an enviable base of blue-chip customers who now have the market leading products being deployed effectively into their organisations effectively and efficiently. Whilst most companies are still aiming at just getting things up and running, Acceleration are able to add far more value than that, because they know how to get things running and then can go on to show their customers how to deploy the solution with robustness in the technology, but with subtlety and intimacy in the customer facing elements.

The scope of Acceleration’s capability is note worthy. They really can take people from the first strategic scoping, through the development phase, into deployment with the necessary training, and product support. That capability is not just at a technical level but embraces the campaign management aspects and can cover the spectrum between being a full turnkey solution or one that facilitates in-house development. So, whether people are looking at email marketing, on-line analytics, ad-serving for advertisers or publishers, or search marketing, Acceleration have real expertise across the spectrum of skills. This is not something that I have seen with other companies, and those that claim to have that spread of skills are reliant on just one or two key individuals to deliver it. What is interesting is that Acceleration have not suffered from high levels of staff turnover which seems to typify their competitors, so they have a genuine core of skilled individuals who have developed into a strong team though years of working together.

Their partnerships with the leading vendors enables them to offer leading technology augmented by proprietary extensions borne of industry expertise and practical experience. This is a potent offering that is clearly valued by both their key partners, Epsilon, DoubleClick and Omniture and by their customers.

In an industry segment in which everything tends to feel very ad-hoc and transitory, Acceleration offer a rare combination of capabilities backed up by a feeling of permanence based on long term relationships which is rare and which makes them a compelling answer to those who are feeling that today the technology is drowning them and diverting their focus from their core capability.