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Accenture launched a new version of its Accenture Cloud Platform, providing new and enhanced cloud management services for public and private cloud infrastructure offerings.
The platform now supports an expanded portfolio of infrastructure service providers including, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Windows Azure, Verizon Terremark and NTT Communications.
By expanding its ecosystem of cloud providers, Accenture can now offer an expanded service catalog that enables customers to acquire cloud services in a pre-packaged, standardized format.
“With this next version, we’ve enhanced its capabilities as a management platform for clients to confidently source and procure capacity from an ecosystem of providers that meet the highest quality standards, as well as providing the critical connections required to seamlessly transition work to the cloud,” Michael Liebow, managing director and global lead for the Accenture Cloud Platform, said in a statement. “An expanded provider portfolio increases our geographic footprint, helping us to better serve our clients around the world as they migrate to the cloud, and fits with our blueprint for enterprise-grade cloud services.”
The new version of the Accenture Cloud Platform offers a more flexible, service-enabled architecture based on open-source components, which helps reduce deployment costs for clients while the expanding catalog of services helps to speed deployments, Liebow said.
Accenture has created a hybrid cloud platform service for enterprise customers that aggregates, integrates, automates and manages cloud services. The Accenture Cloud Platform helps minimize the IT governance and integration issues that can crop up. The platform provides secure, scalable pre-integrated enterprise-ready cloud services; automated provisioning through a self-service portal; and monitoring, metering and centralized chargebacks on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Services on the Accenture Cloud Platform include “Big Data Recommender as a Service,” which employs elastic on-demand tools to analyze large amounts of structured and unstructured data to provide targeted product and customer recommendations. The platform also offers data decommissioning services for enterprises to store data from retired legacy applications in the cloud. Accenture also offers testing-as-a-service and environment provisioning and cloud management services, including an integrated 24/7 Accenture service desk for support.
The addition of the four new cloud providers extends the geographic footprint of the Accenture Cloud Platform with new data center locations in Latin America and Asia, helping to better serve customers around the world. The platform delivers infrastructure services with the following providers:
Amazon Web Services: Providing account enablement and expert assisted provisioning services, the Accenture Cloud Platform supports clients deploying Amazon Web Services environments in their nine regions around the world.
Microsoft Windows Azure: Providing account enablement, the Accenture Cloud Platform supports the deployment of application development solutions on the Windows Azure platform.
Verizon Terremark: Offering provisioning, as well as administrative and support services for Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud, a virtual private cloud solution, the platform adds data centers around the world, extending reach into Latin America through the Verizon Terremark data center in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
NTT Communications: Supporting NTT’s private and public enterprise clouds, Accenture offers provisioning, administrative and support services, as well as professional architecture guidance to help clients design and deploy their applications in the cloud. The platform gains public data centers in Hong Kong and Tokyo, expanding locations in the Asia-Pacific region.
“The addition of Windows Azure platform and infrastructure services to the Accenture Cloud Platform simplifies adoption of cloud services and hybrid computing scenarios for our clients,” Steven Martin, Microsoft’s general manager for Windows Azure, said in a statement. “It offers all the benefits of Azure—rapid provisioning and market-leading price-performance—wrapped in solutions from Accenture.”
“We are focused on providing global customers with a secure, enterprise-ready cloud solution,” said Chris Drumgoole, senior vice president of Global Operations at Verizon Terremark, in a statement. “By participating in the Accenture Cloud Platform ecosystem, our mutual clients have another avenue for acquiring cloud services worldwide.”
“The Accenture Cloud Platform offers enterprise clients total flexibility to design an ecosystem that meets their own unique technology and geography requirements,” said Kazuhiro Gomi, NTT Communications board member and CEO of NTT America, in a statement.
Accenture has done more than 30 conference room pilots for ERP on the platform to help customers provision the cloud for their ERP systems, Liebow said. Accenture has worked on more than 6,000 cloud computing projects for clients, he said. The company has more than 7,900 professionals trained in cloud computing.
The Accenture Cloud Platform is a major part of Accenture’s investment of more than $400 million in cloud technologies, capabilities and training by 2015.