Consulting titan Accenture announced Thursday it has revamped its Accenture Cloud Platform, expanding it to offer cloud management services for public and private cloud infrastructure deployments that can be managed through multiple service provider platforms including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure, Verizon Terremark and NTT communications.
According to Michael Liebow, global managing director for Accenture, through the Ireland-based technology services and management consultant firm's partnerships with the providers, Accenture is able to offer expanded services to clients and ultimately lower costs.
"It is just the beginning, and it represents a set of providers that have a significant global capability where [those providers] are pushing us to do business," said Liebow."[The service providers] have led and defined the cloud market space, and what we can do is help clients create guidelines and guardrail for which capacity to use, when and for what purpose."
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Additionally, with four major providers, the road map extends Accenture's geographic footprint. Accenture already has a presence in the U.S. and Europe, and the partnership allows it to expand into Latin America and Asia, said Liebow.
"The key thing about this road map is that it's driven by the direction our clients want to go in," said Liebow. "It's this whole notion of how to enable a digital business, where we take their IT, the assets they have created in different industries, and ... platform them onto our platform and offer it as services to not just their existing customers but to expand their market reach locally and globally."
With the future of cloud expanding, said Troy Garrison, vice president of cloud experience for Verizon Terremark, the creation of Accenture's cloud platform gives Verizon the ability to globally access and enable its customers.
"Accenture drives a lot of business, and it's a different channel for us, as opposed to our direct sales, and it brings the ability to gain access to our customers," said Garrison. "It benefits us by globally reaching more customers, more use cases for consultants building interesting projects out on the cloud, and it validates the cloud platform," he said, adding that it also gives Verizon "reach to enterprise customers."
The refreshed and updated cloud platform version 2.1 offers a fully serviced flexible architecture to expand Accenture's service catalog and allow its customers to manage multiple cloud computing services.
"It is a flexible platform that acts as a storefront of sorts; it's a single pane of glass where [clients] can have a portfolio of service offerings at infrastructure layer and a variety of different IT services that clients need for their environment," said Liebow.
With the new platform, Liebow said he expects updates to be rolled out in the upcoming months.
"We will be adding a variety of service enhancements in the coming months all because of this foundation."
PUBLISHED AUGUST 6, 2013
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