The cloud is ready for primetime in the enterprise: Accenture’s Omar Abbosh

Accenture and Amazon Web Services have created a business group to help enterprises move to and run their business in AWS cloud.

“Accenture is already a market leader in cloud and the formation of the Accenture AWS Business Group is a key part of our Accenture Cloud First agenda,” says Omar Abbosh, chief strategy officer, Accenture.

“Cloud is increasingly becoming a starting point with our clients for their enterprise solutions,” says Abbosh, who announced the partnership at the AWS re:Invent early this week.

“The cloud is ready for primetime in the enterprise," says Abbosh. "We are making a considerable investment to make sure we can support our clients in the journey of bringing the full power of innovation to the cloud in the enterprise."

Accenture is training an additional 1000 professionals in the new environment and certify 500 Accenture professionals on the AWS Cloud in the first year, and support go-to-market activities, says Abbosh.

Employees assigned to the Accenture AWS Business Group will be equipped with the latest AWS technologies, best-in-class methodologies, highly automated tools for application migration, and software-as-a-service applications for big data management and analytics.

“We are working with more organisations than ever before who have made the decision to transform their business by moving to the AWS Cloud,” says Adam Selipsky, vice president of sales, marketing, and support, AWS, in a statement.

“The Accenture AWS Business Group has been created to empower these organisations to rapidly achieve the agility benefits of moving to AWS so they can eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing their IT infrastructure. They can 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.”

The group will initially focus on two main areas.

Transformation services optimised for AWS: The business group will provide services to clients to move their existing applications to and develop new applications on AWS quickly, economically, and securely. The services include cloud strategy, organisational and architecture design, application migration, refactoring, and new application development services. A dedicated AWS application development and migration ‘factory’ will automate processes to help businesses run more efficiently.

Analytics and Big Data services:The Accenture Insights Platform will be expanded to integrate 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, normalisation, and analytics.

The business group will also explore creating services in high growth areas such as Internet of Things (IoT) and security on the AWS Cloud.

The author attended re:Invent in Las Vegas as a guest of AWS.