Accenture expands AWS Business Group

In a move designed to help customer be more agile, Accenture is expanding its Accenture AWS Business Group to enhance its cloud application migration, development and management offerings.

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Noting that customers are increasingly turning to the cloud to make their operations more agile, Accenture yesterday announced that it will expand its Accenture AWS Business Group to enhance its application migration, development and management offerings. Enhancements around the internet of things (IoT), transformation and analytics and big data are also in the plans.

"We have found that agility of operations is fast becoming the a top business objective for companies migrating to the cloud — surpassing even cost savings — which can only be achieved through a cloud first approach and a robust selection of cloud solutions," Jack Sepple, senior managing director, Accenture Cloud and Accenture Operations group technology officer, said in a statement yesterday. "The Accenture AWS Business Group is an instrumental asset for our customers seeking to speed their journey to the AWS cloud, maximize their existing investments and ultimately deliver increased value to their organizations faster and with lower risk."

Accenture launched the AWS Business Group last year. To date it has trained 2,000 Accenture technologists and earned 500 AWS Certifications while helping clients including Avalon, Hess, Mediaset and Talen Energy migrate to the cloud.

In 2017, Accenture says the group will focus on expanding their offerings for application transformation services and security. Other enhancements will include the following:

IoT Solutions, integrated with AWS. Accenture plans to integrate its industry-specific IoT expertise with AWS Cloud infrastructure and business services designed to help clients achieve greater operational insights and efficiencies.
Transformation Services, optimized for AWS. Accenture will provide an expanded suite of services to help clients move their existing applications to AWS and develop new applications on AWS quickly, economically and securely.
Analytics and Big Data Services, powered by AWS. Accenture says its Accenture Insights Platform has been Hitrust certified and expanded to integrate with AWS data and analytics capabilities to better manage the end-to-end data lifecycle for customers in highly regulated industries.

"Our collaboration with Accenture has helped enable organizations across industries rapidly migrate to AWS and experience measurable business benefits faster than they previously thought possible," Mike Clayville, vice president of Worldwide Sales and Business Development, Amazon Web Services, said in a statement. "With the guidance and support of Accenture AWS Business Group, our joint customers have been able to foster timely adoption of new IT operating models and explore new opportunities using agile, cloud-based solutions that help drive greater efficiencies and productivity throughout their businesses."

Accenture also noted yesterday that it has integrated the enhanced cloud management capabilities of the AWS Cloud into its Accenture Cloud Platform (ACP). Accenture has enabled ACP to work across all AWS Regions and Availability Zones to centralize cloud governance with analytics, cost controls and policy management to fully complement AWS Cloud capabilities.

The new ACP capabilities include the following:

Native support for AWS CloudFormation. ACP now supports blueprints and blueprint management that includes AWS PaaS services, enabling management across multiple datacenters, tags and versions for application stack customization.
Centralized Tag Management. This capability gives ACP customers the ability to view, find missing tags and rationalize them across datacenters and cloud platforms.
AWS-wide cost policies, budgets and quotas. The new cost management feature works across all AWS regions and datacenters, not just VMs, broadening the reach beyond AWS console's datacenter focus.

Accenture says it is also working with AWS to benchmark the industry to explore the different rates by which organizations are migrating to the cloud. The collaboration will examine the benefits of faster adoption and discuss the best practices for accelerating the process.