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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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