Co-opetition in Full-Swing as Accenture Inks a Smart Partnership with AWS

Being “all things to all people” is a losing strategy in today’s market. As we discussed recently, being successful as a digital transformation provider requires a new emphasis on partnership and co-opetition. Providers can’t do everything for everyone, they and must specialize and be distinctive where they can provide a competitive edge. Plus, with the widespread confidence in the security and scalability of public cloud, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for ambitious service providers to keep investing heavily in their own private cloud offerings.

Many large organizations are increasingly feeling the urgency to deploy applications rapidly, to be more agile and extract more value from the data they collect, whilst at the same time they deliver more flexible and cost effective IT infrastructure. These pressures are forcing more IT and business professionals to evaluate public cloud solutions, driving a pivotal moment in its adoption. In short, enterprise clients need access to an affordable, secure and highly scalable public cloud service, supported by the expertise of a specialist to help maximize the potential of their applications and business processes in a digital environment.

Against this background, AWS and Accenture announced the formation of a new business group aimed at helping clients move their business to the cloud. The new group, The Accenture AWS Business Group, is focused on helping IT departments reboot operations though the re-organization of staff, adapting legacy solutions and finding the best ways to extract actionable insight from data assets.

The AWS Business Group will bring together professional teams from both companies. The companies will train an additional 1,000 professional staff, of which 500 will be certified on AWS in the first year. The group will build a set of solutions and services, focusing on cloud application migration, architecture design and application development specifically for AWS. The initial focus of these resources will be on two key areas:

• Transformation Services Optimized for AWS: helping clients to move existing workloads and develop new apps on AWS. One key set of initiatives being the automation of some of the processes.
   
• Analytics and Big Data Services, powered by AWS: This will include expansion of the Accenture Insights Platform allowing the integration of AWS data and analytics capabilities. Presumably this will include the use of some of the new analytics offerings AWS launched at re:Invent at the start of October 2015.

Additionally, the companies will be looking at creating services around IoT and Security, with AWS providing the secure cloud delivery, Accenture the consultative business transformation and execution. This agreement and these offerings build on the existing relationship and collaboration between the two companies. For example, the integration of AWS into the Accenture Cloud Platform and the Accenture Enterprise Application Migration Service for AWS service announced in November 2014.

As the importance of cloud as an agent for innovation within enterprise organizations increases, having the key cloud companies, and in particular AWS, as partners will be vital for the global Systems Integrators. AWS has established itself as the leader in cloud services within the development community. The increasingly loyal base of developers was on display at the recent re:invent show in Las Vegas, which had more than 19,000 attendees. This deal brings in a new set of developers focused on delivering applications and solutions to a broad range of Accenture’s enterprise customers.

AWS has grown rapidly, with its current annual revenue run rate over $7 billion. Much of this has been down to the uptake of its cloud services within the developer community. Although it has been successful selling into enterprise space, having Accenture as a partner will help legitimize and accelerate its position with corporate IT and business users. Accenture will add key public cloud options as the corporate world seeks increased adoption.

Watch this space for the upcoming blueprint primer on Business Cloud later this quarter.