OSINT. "Accent on the Future"...

It was early-August of 2000 and topics of the “Dark Web” were prolific around the conference table at 8:00AM on that early Monday morning.  Our building on Wilson Blvd was just a few blocks up the hill from the Rosslyn, VA Metro Station.

Soon the dialogue turned to the weekends OSINT and the Terabytes our Cyveillance Web crawlers had retrieved across the globe.

Minding clients business on the Internet was going beyond what was visible with run of the mill browsers and growing search engines.  It had now gone dark, without the right tools, software and protocols.

Now was our opportunity to begin new strategic ventures with clients on three key “Decision Advantages”:

• Continuity
• Safety
• Resilience

How as a Fortune 500 company operating across the globe could you apply these factors to increase your awareness and integrity of your content on the World Wide Web?

Where and how were your adversaries using your published information in nefarious ways to attack your organization?  To influence your product perceptions.  To launch campaigns of doubt against you.

It was now time to get on a plane to fly to the U.S. HQ of our global clients to inform them what was at stake beyond brand protection, social media monitoring and threat investigation, analysis, and response services.

• Think about your business technology operations.  What factors could impact the continuity of your services based upon your geographic locations?
• Think about your employees health and exposure to life threatening acts of sabotage or natural weather events.
• Think about your organizations ability to defend itself against a spectrum of threats and to bounce back quickly to stay in competition with rivals.

Little did we know what was in our future, just about a year away in September 2001.

What if we could apply Continuity, Safety and Resilience (CSR) into our dialogue with a majority of our clients major growth initiatives?

On that Wednesday morning wake up call after a flight to O’hare the previous evening, it was thoughts of Arthur Andersen and the meeting ahead at their HQ.

That morning in a small office looking out on Chicago, we learned about the vast strategy of making a split of AA and Andersen Consulting into a new renaming on 1 January 2001.

Andersen Consulting would soon adopt the new name "Accenture". The word "Accenture" was derived from "Accent on the future”.

The question that morning was now on the “White Board”.

"Where are all the places on the Internet with the brand name “Andersen Consulting” that now needs to be changed to Accenture with a new logo?"

We can help with that business problem in a few hours.  The following day we knew that there were thousands of instances on the “Sun Microsystems” sites alone.

In July of 2001 Accenture would go public (IPO) and 8 years later move their HQ to Dublin, Ireland.  Today they have 779,000+ employees and revenue of US$69.xx billion (2025)…