Accenture and AWS

“I get by with a little help from my friends” -The Beatles

In an upcoming post I will detail some characteristics common to enterprises working successfully in the cloud. One of those characteristics is making sure that you have a cloud center of excellence within your organization. For enterprises that want to accelerate their movement to the cloud, working with someone in the Amazon Web Services Partner Network (APN) who has the expertise is often a great way to do so. Last week at re:invent Accenture announced an expansion of its work with AWS in which Accenture will be working with its customers and AWS to offer best in class migration to AWS and end-to-end management with the Accenture Cloud Platform (ACP). Accenture has the capabilities to work with customers on all aspects of cloud migrations — from strategy through implementation and run.

Below I am happy to post the announcement from Michael S. Liebow, the Global Managing Director of Accenture’s Cloud Platform.

The Great Cloud Migration of 2015

By Michael S. Liebow, Global Managing Director, Accenture Cloud Platform

We’re thrilled to have helped sponsor re:Invent — and further our relationship with AWS, which dates back to its earliest days. It was a great conference and the audience was very excited about the innovative and exciting work that Accenture and AWS are doing together. We are driving great change in our industry.

At re:Invent, we were pleased to announce expanded collaboration with Amazon Web Services.

• We are working to move enterprises to full-scale use by simplifying and accelerating end-to-end migration through new cloud migration and management services that help enterprise clients move from cloud pilots to enterprise-wide deployments in the AWS Cloud. Part of Accenture’s broader enterprise application migration capabilities, the service spans the full planning — migration — management lifecycle, with a special emphasis on testing services to quickly get applications up and running in AWS.
• We announced a Center of Excellence in Seattle focused on the development of new assets and capabilities on AWS.
• We released Accenture Cloud Platform (ACP) discovery capabilities for AWS. In addition, we are now providing automated, self-service, enterprise grade cloud management services on AWS via ACP — that enable rapid access to cloud services that can be dialed up or down based on demand or workload. Moreover, they bring a higher level of server integrity and hygiene that most organizations have on their private side, to the public cloud.

There are major forces at work. Enterprises are under enormous pressure to innovate faster. Today they are exposed to disruption not only by digitally savvy start-ups, but by large traditional companies that are starting to use technology as a driver for fast and effective growth.

At the same time, this rapid-fire innovation has to happen with little to no additional resources. There are just no spare funds lying around to finance it. And there certainly are no extra people to drive it. Demands on companies’ IT resources are increasing each year, yet their budgets are flat. As a result, IT organizations operate under increased pressure to deliver more robust services with greater flexibility in less time and with fewer resources.

To help address this resource-to-expectation gap, companies are increasingly looking to cloud computing in their bids to become agile, digital businesses — and to unlock encumbered resources, namely people and assets, to fund innovation. By weaving cloud into the fabric of their businesses and in so doing, acquiring the ability to deliver everything as a service, they expect to achieve a broad spectrum of business outcomes.

There are important considerations, however, as enterprises embark on this journey. For example, as business units and their users have experienced the benefits of cloud, we have seen a proliferation of cloud accounts and instances.. As for our clients, they have on premise infrastructure, public clouds, and many combinations of the two in the form of hybrid IT — and all of this alongside their legacy mainframes, distributed computing, and virtual computing environments. CIOs strive to get the best out of this hybrid world, but are faced with tough decisions about where workloads should reside and how to get them there.

According to our research, nearly 75 percent of large enterprises are planning to have hybrid deployments by 2015. Analyst firms are expecting the global market for hybrid cloud solutions to grow at 33 percent CAGR, from $11 billion in 2014 to $60 billion in 2020. In other words, ‘hybrid is hot’.

A hybrid cloud approach can help, but “hybrid” doesn’t mean just bolting together something convenient for an immediate functional need. Instead, the focus should be on enabling a cohesive, integrated approach to hybrid IT. A hybrid world demands hybrid skills; the most valuable talent will be the architect who understands the functions and roles of all the pieces and who knows how they all work together. The more heterogeneous the cloud environment, the more the organization needs to design and economically operate a mosaic of best-in-class capabilities.

As you know, this stuff isn’t always simple. Figuring out how to get the best out of this hybrid world is paramount for the CIOs we work with. And that’s what we are committed to bringing to the table. 18 months ago we announced a $400 million investment in cloud over 3 years. As part of this investment, we stood up the Accenture Cloud Platform (ACP), our cloud management platform. ACP has evolved to become the foundation, or the ‘glue,’ of our integrated enterprise cloud solutions. The centralized dashboard and discovery-based management plane gives organizations the power and flexibility to manage their workloads simply and securely in the public cloud domain. Because it’s delivered ‘as-a-service’, services can be dialed up or down as needed and paid for ‘by the drink’.

Accenture’s Cloud Business has grown to over $2 billion in revenues with double digit growth in the past year. We have more than 14,000 professionals focused on cloud and we’ve completed or have in process more than 8,000 cloud projects, including work with about 75% of the Fortune Global 100. As our clients gain comfort with the cloud, they are undertaking more ambitious business transformation programs, requiring more end-to-end services to deliver their desired business outcomes.

The Great Migration to the Cloud is real, it’s necessary and together with AWS we are making it easier and faster. Our new end-to-end cloud migration and management services will help companies move from cloud pilots to enterprise-wide deployments in the AWS Cloud quickly and gain the agility they need. We look forward to working with AWS to serve our clients.