Accenture and Microsoft Corp. have expanded their long-standing strategic alliance with the introduction of the Accenture Hybrid Cloud Solution for Microsoft Azure, a powerful hybrid cloud platform designed to bring new capabilities, economics and innovation to the enterprise. Working with Avanade, the companies are co-funding and co-engineering this platform with new hybrid technologies and services to help enterprises build and manage enterprise-wide cloud infrastructure and applications.

"Our expanded relationship with Microsoft represents a game-changing proposition that addresses the biggest concerns and complexities our clients face as they look to leverage the cloud," said Pierre Nanterme, chairman and CEO, Accenture. "With new demands being placed on IT departments every day, enterprises need to smartly connect their infrastructure, software applications, data and operations capabilities in order to become agile, intelligent, digital businesses. This unique collaboration with Microsoft and Avanade is one of Accenture’s most strategic and important initiatives for driving enterprise-wide cloud adoption.”

“Enterprises around the globe are looking for the right platforms and partners to help them transform and thrive in the mobile-first, cloud-first world,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft Corp. “The Microsoft Cloud, combined with Accenture’s industry knowledge and implementation expertise, accelerates our customers’ cloud adoption and unlocks new benefits, including powerful applications, data-driven insights and increased productivity.”

This agreement is the most far-reaching collaboration between Accenture and Microsoft since the 2000 joint venture to launch Avanade, a leading Microsoft solution provider with more than 22,000 employees and more than US $2 billion in global sales.

The Accenture Hybrid Cloud Solution for Microsoft Azure delivers new technologies to migrate and manage applications between private and public clouds in a controlled, seamless and automated way – on demand, at speed and from a single console. The solution integrates and builds on key capabilities from the three companies to help enterprises deliver “everything as a service,” including:

• The Microsoft Cloud Platform of Microsoft Azure providing enterprise performance, hyper-scale and hybrid capabilities connected to Windows Server with Hyper-V, System Center and Azure Pack running in customer data centers.
• The Accenture Cloud Platform which supports multi-platform environments with self-service provisioning for any application. Its central dashboard controls cloud brokerage and management capabilities, and provides the enterprise-grade governance, reliability, security and operations enterprise clients expect.
• An end-to-end spectrum of professional services to help clients define and execute against their cloud goals, based on Accenture’s specialized industry knowledge and proven business transformation experience – from strategy and transformation to migration, deployment and managed services.
• Avanade’s deep bench of skilled professionals equipped with broad expertise in Microsoft technologies and a laser focus on unlocking business value in the enterprise.

The solution is already being piloted at Freeport-McMoRan, an international natural resource company, to prototype a new Industrial Internet of Things platform to improve mining operations. The platform will enable operations supervisors to analyze and react to near real-time situations in the mine, allowing them to take immediate action on items that impact mine production, which ultimately drives revenue.

“As our business makes the transformation to digital mining, we engaged Accenture and Microsoft to show us how we can capture the benefits of hybrid cloud and accelerate our journey,” said Bert Odinet, CIO, Freeport-McMoRan.

For more information, visit www.accenture.com/hybridcloud