Cloud: Services Overview

Lowered costs, enhanced flexibility and the ability to create new revenue streams are making cloud a technology of choice for high performance. But, cloud can do more. Cloud can:

• Connect customers and citizens anytime, anywhere.

• Enhance insight through advanced analytics.

• Eliminate organizational boundaries.

• Spur new products and services.

• Broaden global footprint at lowered cost.

We are seeing benefits in many industries:

• Electronic health records follow patients from doctor to doctor, allowing more coordinated care.

• Applications such as product barcode scanners have brought instantaneous, online comparison shopping to the retail industry.

• Global peer-to-peer lending services allow consumers to sidestep banks with hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions.

• Applications such as Pandora and Genius for iTunes aggregate and analyze user feedback in real time.

How Accenture can help:

• Help develop a strategy and roadmap for integrating cloud technologies in your IT environment, assessing both benefits and risks.

• Help plan, implement and manage a third-party SaaS solution to maximize speed to value and business functionality.

• Design, build, or re-platform applications in the cloud, reducing total cost of ownership.

• Build, integrate and manage private, public or hybrid cloud infrastructures to support an agile business.

View the Cloud Computing Here and Now Video

Adding cloud computing to your technology arsenal involves everything from a strategic road map to minute operational details. Accenture helps you not only sort through the many vendors, services and technologies in the market, but helps integrate and manage your new IT landscape for high performance.

• Deep industry knowledge provides us a unique perspective.

• The risks associated with cloud play to Accenture’s areas of strength: security, reliability, compliance, integration.

• Accenture provides and integrates cloud service, drawing from our experience in managing complex environments.

• Accenture is an independent advisor that sits within a large, but select, ecosystem of cloud providers.  We bring objectivity to the selection of vendors that best fit our clients’ individual needs, driving consistency and accountability. Currently, we have agreements with 25 cloud providers such as Amazon, Cisco Systems, Google, Microsoft, salesforce.com, Netsuite and  VMWare (see our full list of alliances).

Accenture has invested in skilled, cost-effective tools and methodologies to help clients take full advantage of new cloud-based technologies whether they build their own cloud environment, implement new cloud-based software services, or re-platform and integrate their legacy applications onto cloud-based platforms.

Working directly with clients, Accenture has become a major player in providing services in the cloud. As a global provider, with services spanning strategy through implementation and run, we use real-time experience to adjust our strategy, investments, sales approach and operating models to help clients realize the greatest value from cloud technologies.

We approach our clients’ unique needs through the following differentiated services:

Accenture Cloud Platform
Accenture helps mitigate the challenges associated with cloud governance and service delivery by providing a platform and a proprietary set of software and business process services that accelerate the successful adoption and integration of cloud services—without compromising quality, standards or security. The Accenture Cloud Platform can be accessed in an on-demand fashion as a managed service, or as an asset for on-premise deployments.

Cloud Strategy
With proven methodologies and proprietary tools, Accenture Cloud Computing Strategy builds a road map for integrating cloud technologies in a broader IT strategy.

Private/Public Cloud Infrastructure
Whether it is public/private cloud migration for enterprises or governments, cloud infrastructure services for service providers, or cloud enterprise services for hybrid cloud environments, Accenture can guide you on your path to the cloud. Our teams help organizations transform and operate their infrastructure—including servers and storage, networks, security and workplace services—to a virtualized, automated, service-based model. This is the starting point for integrating cloud services, which add another layer of complexity to the IT environment.

Software as a Service (SaaS) Implementation
Accenture helps organizations address how to plan, implement and manage a third-party SaaS solution to maximize speed to value and business functionality.

Agile Application and Platform Management
Accenture believes that cloud will become the primary platform and enabler for application development and management and replatforming in the near future (for some industry leaders, it already is). Our agile Application and platform solution focuses on the use of cloud of three ways:  first, platform as a service (PaaS), second, application modernization, and, third, cloud-enabled systems integration.

In each case we are able to leverage assets, methods, delivery capabilities, and alliance relationships that in combination provide Accenture with a uniquely differentiated client value proposition, including potential reduced infrastructure costs, reduced total cost of ownership and improved speed to value. 

Accenture Software
For years, Accenture has used its deep industry experience to build software that meets specific industry needs. Now, Accenture is working on bringing this same technology to clients as a service.

Business Process Utilities
Outsourcing can help cut costs and create a more flexible workforce. Cloud is the next iteration of outsourcing, adding to the beneficial economics many companies already experience. Accenture can help.