Red Hat and Accenture have expanded their nearly 12 year strategic partnership to further power open hybrid cloud innovation for enterprises worldwide. The companies are jointly investing in the co-development of new solutions to help organizations more seamlessly navigate a multi- and hybrid cloud world, define their strategy, and accelerate their pace of innovation to get to value faster.

With the combination of Accenture Cloud First and Red Hat OpenShift, organizations are better equipped to embrace the cloud continuum - a range of capabilities, from public to private to edge computing, all connected by modern networks and built with a zero-trust security mindset - to accelerate enterprise reinvention. A hybrid solution brings the public cloud benefits of innovation, speed, consumption and scale with private cloud advantages of regulatory compliance, performance and data gravity.

To further help organizations migrate to hybrid cloud, Red Hat and Accenture are co-developing new solutions over the next year with an initial focus on the following four areas:

• Open hybrid cloud application and mainframe modernization - With the boundaries for public and private cloud blurring and no one-size-fits-all solution, Accenture and Red Hat are helping clients develop a holistic cloud strategy that embraces hybrid to enable greater operational efficiency and drive innovation based on Red Hat OpenShift.

• Automation - As organizations continue to modernize, they need consistent, resilient and standardized solutions for managing their cloud estate. Accenture and Red Hat are developing solutions that automate and orchestrate workloads across the IT infrastructure to reduce risk and lower costs of technology operations. This includes the development of Accenture solutions on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to deliver stable, automated cloud computing capabilities. As a result, the companies helped one client achieve a 99% reduction in downtime for rolling upgrades, a 100% reduction in downtime for operating system patching, and 50% faster development time through infrastructure as code.

• Edge Computing - The scale and complexity of data created by connected devices are continuously pushing the limits of network and infrastructure capabilities. New solutions under development by Red Hat and Accenture are focused on analyzing and processing data where it is generated to improve the customer experience and reduce latency. With Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, applications can be deployed and automated at the edge, reducing dependency on a physical footprint.

• Sovereign Cloud - Organizations are navigating an intricate patchwork of technology solutions while aligning with new, emerging industry standards and compliance requirements in various countries and sectors. Accenture and Red Hat are jointly committed to helping clients control the location, access to and processing of their data in the cloud through open source technologies and services.

Red Hat and Accenture have worked together to deliver transformative outcomes for hundreds of organizations across industries. For example, Finanz Informatik, an innovative IT partner for the financial sector, worked with Red Hat and Accenture to implement an ambitious next-level multi-channel architecture for its core banking applications. Using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, with strategic support from Accenture, Finanz Informatik modernized its IT infrastructure to significantly improve business agility and more quickly respond to evolving customer needs.

Unlocking the rich value and capabilities of hybrid cloud requires deep collaboration across an ecosystem of IT vendors. A recent IDC white paper sponsored by Red Hat revealed that organizations can accelerate application migration projects by 47% and achieve a three-year return on investment of 523% when implementing Red Hat OpenShift with a Red Hat accredited global systems integrator such as Accenture. With this expanded partnership, Red Hat and Accenture bring together robust partner ecosystems, equipped with deep technical expertise to support customers across any cloud and any industry, in order to support multi-partner engagements and deliver tailored cloud solutions.