Accenture Cloud Platform to Help Businesses Integrate and Manage Technology in a Hybrid World

NEW YORK – To help clients get the most business value from cloud computing and in anticipation of the shift in demand toward the public cloud, Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has launched the Accenture Cloud Platform. As more and more clients are going digital, the Accenture Cloud Platform provides services and solutions designed to help organizations integrate and manage the hybrid cloud environments that span across multiple vendor platforms and are critical to providing ultimate flexibility and supporting emerging technologies.

The Accenture Cloud Platform represents an important next step in Accenture’s cloud strategy and reaffirms the company’s intent to providing cloud brokering and orchestration services that are growing in importance to clients. As part of this strategic initiative, Accenture will invest more than $400 million in cloud technologies, capabilities and training by 2015 to focus on delivering the right cloud services from its network of providers, as well as blending its own industry solutions and innovations with third party offerings.

“Already in use on more than 200 projects, the Accenture Cloud Platform features proven technologies and business processes to help our clients make the safe journey to cloud,” said Jack Sepple, global senior managing director - Cloud, Accenture. “We foresee the growing use of public cloud services and are uniquely positioned to offer the best of breed from a variety of vendors. We are committed to moving our extensive portfolio of cloud offerings, broad ecosystem of alliance relationships, and large global client base to the cloud in all forms – public, private and hybrid.”

According to the Accenture Technology Vision 2013 report, digital technology has become a strategic imperative and a tool of competitive intent for businesses today. Supported by the cloud, technology trends like mobile, social collaboration and big data are changing the landscape as an increasing number of businesses go digital. The Accenture Cloud Platform provides a secure, scalable, and enterprise-ready cloud integration system to support these critical changes. It provides management and control over cloud services that are being delivered to clients, whether by Accenture or from a third party provider such as Microsoft, SAP and others.

As part of its overall investment, Accenture has created expanded services on the Accenture Cloud Platform, including public and virtual private cloud infrastructure, data decommissioning, software systems testing and big data analytics solutions in the cloud.

Accenture has already worked on more than 4,000 cloud projects for clients, including over half of the Fortune Global 100, and has more than 6,700 professionals trained in cloud. Accenture is consistently recognized for its industry leadership by leading independent analyst firms and software alliance partners.

According to industry analyst firm IDC1, the total market size for cloud will grow from approximately $40 billion in 2012 to $98 billion in 2016. This includes projections for software as a service (SaaS) to reach $37 billion, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to reach $30 billion, system infrastructure software as a service to reach $20 billion, and platform as a service (PaaS) to reach $10 billion by 2016.

Learn more about the Accenture Cloud Platform: http://www.accenture.com/cloudplatform

1 IDC Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services 2012–2016 Forecast, Aug 2012

About Accenture
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 261,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$27.9 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2012. Its home page is www.accenture.com.