Accenture Making Big Moves to Improve Its Standing as a Cloud Leader

Accenture has been working hard to make its mark in the cloud services space. Here are some of the IT services firm’s most significant recent efforts.

Thanks to a collaboration between Mediaset, Italy’s largest TV broadcaster, and Accenture, UEFA Champions League football fans may never have to miss a game again. Using Accenture’s Video Solution Platform in tandem with Amazon Web Services Cloud, Mediaset can stream UEFA Champions League football matches to more than a million customers through its Premium Play soccer service. The service hit 1 million subscribers within one month of launching and receives more than 600,000 unique visitors each month, more than doubling pre-collaboration estimates.

RCS MediaGroup selected Accenture, Avanade and Microsoft to accelerate the company’s path of growth and transformation using the cloud. The project will help RCS address challenges such as how to obtain the most from content and data as well as how to get to know and retain its customers. Accenture, Avanade and Microsoft will work together to offer RCS a high-performance cloud solution leveraging the Accenture Hybrid Cloud Solution for Microsoft Azure and the Accenture Cloud Platform.

Talen Energy Supply, an indirect subsidiary of Talen Energy Corp., selected Accenture to provide operations and technology services with an infrastructure-as-a-service model for business applications hosted in a virtual private cloud on Amazon Web Services.

In January, Accenture acquired CRMWaypoint, a supplier of cloud advisory and technology services in the Netherlands, specializing in Salesforce cloud solutions for sales, service and marketing. The acquisition reinforces Accenture’s Cloud First agenda that provides customers with cloud strategy and technology consulting, as well as cloud application implementation, integration and management services.

In November 2015, Accenture announced the acceleration of its research and development agenda in artificial intelligence (AI) across its global network of Accenture Technology Labs by opening the newest lab in Dublin and committing a significant portion of its global R&D capabilities to help customers across industries integrate intelligent systems to improve operations and create new growth opportunities.

In October 2015, Accenture completed its acquisition of Cloud Sherpas, a leader in cloud advisory and technology services specializing in Google, Salesforce and ServiceNow. The acquisition further strengthens Accenture’s position in the enterprise cloud services space and enhances its ability to provide customers with cloud strategy and technology consulting, as well as cloud application implementation, integration and management services.

Accenture and Amazon Web Services have formed a business group to help customers more quickly move their business to the cloud. The business group delivers a suite of services and solutions that unify business process re-engineering, application migration services, architecture design and application development for the AWS Cloud so enterprise customers can accelerate innovation, enter new markets and ultimately achieve improved business results.

The European Commission Directorate-General for Informatics (EC DIGIT) selected a consortium of Accenture, Comparex and Microsoft to provide public cloud services to institutions in the European Union, enabling access to new cloud and digital capabilities for public services. The consortium will provide the public cloud services under two lots—one for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) capabilities and a second for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capabilities—using the Accenture Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure technologies.