Accenture is extending its reach into cloud-related services through the development of a new initiative aimed at helping organizations integrate and manage hybrid cloud environments across multiple platforms.
The New York-based company has announced the availability of the Accenture Cloud Platform, which is intended to support cloud brokerage and orchestration services that are becoming more frequently offered by managed service providers and channel partners.
"We are not doing data centers, nor are we creating horizontal solutions, or becoming a CRM provider," said Jack Sepple, global senior managing director of Accenture's cloud initiative. "Instead, this is about integrating those kinds of offers together. So we're going toward a platform that does self-service cataloging with provisioning. Everything will be pre-integrated and pretested by us before we offer it."
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Current offerings include infrastructure solutions built around compute, network and storage. Offerings are provided either on an hourly basis or a monthly basis, depending on the nature of the contract. The platform is also providing support for testing, big data as a service and platform as a service.
"Our intention is to move up the stack as time goes on so that we can reach further into business processes," said Sepple. "So we will make more announcements as time goes on, as we roll out additional enhancements and new services to be offered on the platform. Over the course of time, we intend to push more deeply into critical business services, which are really industry aligned solutions, and our intent is to use the platform to enhance our service capabilities and our software solutions over the long term."
As part of this initiative, Accenture intends to invest more than $400 million in the cloud, including enhancements to this platform, as well as various professional services and supporting deliverables.
"We see huge opportunity in the cloud, and it's important to be at the forefront of that inflection point," added Sepple. "We are committed to helping our customers to navigate this trend, and to maximize its impact to the highest benefits of our customers."
Accenture claims that it has already worked on more than 4,000 cloud projects for clients, including more than half of the Fortune Global 100. The company says it has more than 6,700 professionals trained in cloud-related technologies.
PUBLISHED APRIL 5, 2013
