On Tuesday, 20 October, two acquisitions landed within hours of each other. Accenture has acquired Avicado, a Miami-based construction technology consultancy with more than 190 employees. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Avicado helps large project owners implement and integrate construction technology platforms, including Procore, Autodesk Construction Cloud, BIM 360, Trimble Unity Construct, e-Builder, Oracle Primavera P6, Textura and Kahua. The same morning CBRE agreed to buy Onnec, the London structured cabling and data centre infrastructure firm with roughly 800 staff, for £460m in cash plus a multi-year earnout of up to £300m.
Neither Avicado nor Onnec designs buildings or pours concrete. One configures the software stack a capital programme runs on. The other pulls the fibre that makes a data centre a data centre rather than an expensive shed. Both are plumbing, and two of the largest service firms in the world decided on the same day that the plumbing was worth owning outright. If you work in or for a mid-sized UK consultancy, that deserves a closer look.
What Accenture actually bought
Avicado was founded in 2015, and its website lists 140+ clients across 15 industries, including Meta and QTS Data Centers. Its services are the unglamorous middle of digital delivery: system implementation, integrations between PMIS, ERP and finance systems, reporting and dashboarding, and managed services. It also puts people on site as owner's representatives doing controls, schedule and document management. Accenture says the whole team joins Accenture Construct in the United States.
Accenture Construct is only a month old. Launched in September, it pulls together more than 5,000 practitioners from a run of acquisitions, including Soben in the UK, and pitches owners a single accountable partner across the project lifecycle. Accenture puts the addressable market for owner-side capital project services at $260bn, growing 7.5% a year to $348bn by 2030.
Adam J. Shaw, CEO of Accenture Construct, described Avicado as
…our next move to give owners the full breadth of capabilities they need—proven industry platforms, people and process, and AI—and enabling us to take greater accountability for client outcomes.
Accenture's interest here goes well beyond advising on your Procore rollout. It wants to own the rollout, the data that flows through it and the AI layer on top. The 190 specialists who used to be an independent option on an owner's shortlist are now one line in a very large catalogue.
What CBRE actually bought
Onnec dates from 1986 and designs, deploys and maintains network, fibre and data centre infrastructure for hyperscalers across the UK, continental Europe and Asia Pacific. CBRE expects it to generate about £370m of revenue and more than £50m of core EBITDA in 2027, inside a Critical Infrastructure Services line that CBRE forecasts at nearly $4.5bn of revenue next year with Onnec included.
Vikram Kohli, CBRE's Chief Operating Officer, was blunt: "CBRE is pursuing an explicit strategy to build a global infrastructure services business to complement our real estate services business." TechTarget's Shane Snider worked out that the £460m upfront price is roughly nine times Onnec's forecast 2027 core EBITDA, rising to about 15 times if the full earnout pays out. Those are TechTarget's calculations, not multiples CBRE has published, and CBRE has not disclosed the earnout formula.
Alex Cordovil, research director at Dell'Oro Group, gave TechTarget the clearest explanation we have seen of why a property services firm would pay that for cablers.
Hyperscaler buildouts now run across many regions at once, and the bottleneck has moved from capital to execution: getting capacity designed, deployed and handed over on time, the same way in every market.
Capital, in other words, is available; the handover is what slips, and cabling sits on the critical path to energising capacity. Cordovil also told TechTarget that AI clusters "multiply fibre counts per rack and per hall" because GPU back-end networks are far denser than traditional compute. Whoever controls the fibre controls when the owner starts earning revenue.
Where this leaves the mid-sized UK consultancy
For mid-sized consultancies: Winning owner-side work in 2027 may depend on offering clear accountability backed by a strong data platform. Accenture has made this approach explicit, while CBRE's acquisition reflects a similar strategy in data centres. Smaller PM and cost consultancies must decide whether to become specialist subcontractors to larger platforms or remain independent advisers for clients who prefer a more focused service. Firms caught between these positions risk losing ground.
For clients choosing an integration partner: Independent Procore and Autodesk specialists are becoming harder to find as larger groups acquire them. When tendering for PMIS implementation support, clients should ask whether their chosen partner will remain independent throughout the contract and what happens to their data model if a new parent company favours a different platform. Cordovil's advice to data centre operators on supplier concentration, pricing and staffing also applies here.
For talent: Avicado's 190-plus employees are joining a company of roughly 814,000 people, while Onnec's 800 employees are joining a group with more than 155,000. UK consultancies looking for people with hands-on experience configuring these platforms should keep an eye on staff movements following the acquisitions.
Takeaway
Two deals on one day are a small sample, though they point the same way. The large service firms have decided that configuring the software and wiring the building are the parts of the job that determine whether an owner's programme delivers, so those are the parts worth owning. If you run or work for a mid-sized consultancy, your defensible ground is narrowing to two places: deep specialism, the platforms need to buy in, or genuine independence, the owner chooses to pay for. It is worth deciding who you are before a client decides for you.
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