Accenture has launched the Accenture Cloud Platform, providing services and solutions designed to help organisations integrate and manage the hybrid cloud environments that span across multiple vendor platforms and are critical to providing ultimate flexibility and supporting emerging technologies.
The Accenture Cloud Platform represents an important next step in Accenture’s cloud strategy and reaffirms the company’s intent to providing cloud brokering and orchestration services that are growing in importance to clients.
As part of this strategic initiative, Accenture will invest more than $400-million globally in cloud technologies, capabilities and training by 2015 to focus on delivering the right cloud services from its network of providers, as well as blending its own industry solutions and innovations with third-party offerings.
“Already in use on more than 200 projects, the Accenture Cloud Platform features proven technologies and business processes to help our clients make the safe journey to cloud,” says Jack Sepple, global senior MD: cloud at Accenture.
“We foresee the growing use of public cloud services and are uniquely positioned to offer the best of breed from a variety of vendors. We are committed to moving our extensive portfolio of cloud offerings, broad ecosystem of alliance relationships, and large global client base to the cloud in all forms – public, private and hybrid.”
According to the Accenture Technology Vision 2013 report, digital technology has become a strategic imperative and a tool of competitive intent for businesses today. Supported by the cloud, technology trends like mobile, social collaboration and big data are changing the landscape as an increasing number of businesses go digital.
The Accenture Cloud Platform provides a secure, scalable, and enterprise-ready cloud integration system to support these critical changes. It provides management and control over cloud services that are being delivered to clients, whether by Accenture or from a third party provider such as Microsoft, SAP and others.
As part of its overall investment, Accenture has created expanded services on the Accenture Cloud Platform, including public and virtual private cloud infrastructure, data decommissioning, software systems testing and big data analytics solutions in the cloud.
Accenture has already worked on more than 4 000 cloud projects for clients, including over half of the Fortune Global 100, and has more than 6 700 professionals trained in cloud.
According to industry analyst firm IDC, the total market size for cloud will grow from approximately $40-billion in 2012 to $98-billion in 2016.
This includes projections for software as a service (SaaS) to reach $37-billion, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to reach $30-billion, system infrastructure software as a service to reach $20-billion, and platform as a service (PaaS) to reach $10-billion by 2016.