When a report surfaced this week that Oracle was looking into acquiring professional services giant Accenture, some characterized it as an early April Fools’ Day joke and discounted it out of hand.
They shouldn’t.
Over the past few decades, Oracle
orcl
has made a series of bold and expensive acquisitions to shore up parts of its business where its executives see gaps. Accenture
acn
, the giant IT consultancy and systems integrator, would give Oracle a much bigger presence in IT services, and not incidentally, help customers move new or existing applications to the cloud, a key consideration for Oracle, which is looking to fend off incursions by Amazon
amzn
Web Services and other cloud-first companies
Rivals like IBM
ibm
have huge services businesses, bolstered by their own acquisitions. IBM pumped up its own cloud services business with the acquisition of Bluewolf Group, the largest service partner to Salesforce
crm
, which competes with Oracle in sales and marketing software.
Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst Moor Insights & Strategy, agreed that a deal could happen. “Given where Oracle is in the cloud this is a distinct possibility. I would see this as Oracle waving the white flag on its own deliverables and relying on a services model to work with everyone’s solution.”
Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter.
The initial report-by British tech news site The Register- says Oracle
orcl
has hired consultants to look into a possible deal. It quoted one unnamed source saying that if this were a 100-meter race, Oracle was 10- to 15-meters into it, so a lot could still happen-or not happen.
An Oracle spokeswoman initially declined comment on Saturday but the following day issued a categorical denial: “The Accenture rumor is completely untrue. Never even considered it,” the spokeswoman, Deborah Hellinger, said via email on Sunday. An Accenture spokeswoman said the company does not comment on rumor and speculation.
If there is an acquisition, it would be pricey. Accenture has a market cap of just over $74 billion and trailing 12-month revenues of $33.7 billion. It employs about 400,000 people worldwide.
Skeptics point out that since Accenture is already a long-time Oracle partner, it’s not certain what benefit it would derive from acquiring it. “Why buy the cow” if Oracle already gets the benefits of a partnership, asked one analyst according to Investors Business Daily.
Doubters also point to the fact that Accenture partners with almost all the major tech companies, including Oracle rivals, and that Oracle ownership could threaten that. However, similar arguments were made when IBM bought the PwC Consulting business years ago, and IBM’s services group appears to have kept its vendor agnostic worldview.