News

Accenture-AWS Partnership Aimed at Cloud Migration

• By David Ramel
• 10/19/2015

IT consultancy Accenture is teaming up with Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) to help enterprises migrate their business operations to the cloud.

The two companies said they formed Accenture AWS Business Group to provide application migration, development and management services to organizations needing to innovate faster, lower costs and deliver increased IT value.

"The Accenture AWS Business Group brings together dedicated professionals from each company with expertise in cloud solutions architecture and development, marketing, sales, and business development," the companies said in a statement earlier this month. "The business group will offer integrated consulting and technology solutions designed to help enterprise clients take greater advantage of the flexibility and economics of an 'as-a-service' operating model where IT and business services are delivered on-demand, via the AWS cloud."

In a two-pronged approach, initial services will focus on helping organizations move existing applications to the cloud and develop new ones on the platform, and also helping customers with analytics and Big Data services.

The former initiative will provide cloud strategy, help with organizational and architecture design, refactoring of existing applications, migration of existing applications and development of new applications. "A dedicated AWS application development and migration 'factory' will automate processes to help businesses run more efficiently," the companies said.

The Big Data effort will see the expansion of the Accenture Insights Platform to work with AWS data and analytics capabilities. "This will allow customers with compliance and regulatory requirements to better manage the end-to-end data lifecycle from data migration, curation, normalization and analytics," the companies said.

To help in those efforts, Accenture is expected to train 1,000 new workers and certify 500 IT pros on AWS cloud technology in the first year.

"We are working with more organizations than ever before who have made the decision to transform their business by moving to the AWS Cloud," said AWS exec Adam Selipsky. "The Accenture AWS Business Group has been created to empower these organizations to rapidly achieve the agility benefits of moving to AWS so they can eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing their IT infrastructure and instead focus on adopting new IT operating models, addressing new market opportunities, and growing their business, at the same time they reduce their overall IT costs."