digibyte: Amazon and Accenture get cozy, watch out everyone else
- Summary:
- Amazon and Accenture have inked what could be one of the most important deals of the year. We think this represents an important shift in the cloud power game.
Three years ago, if you'd asked me whether Accenture and Amazon would make good bedfellows, I'd have likely laughed. At the time, I saw Amazon as a great dev and test environment while Accenture still had its head buried in SAP projects.
Roll on to today and Jack Clark at Bloomberg reports that Amazon and Accenture have inked a deal that sees the two companies developing fresh services for mutual customers. In his commentary, Clark hedges his bets:
The new venture, announced Wednesday at an Amazon event in Las Vegas, will be staffed by Amazon and Accenture employees, who’ll design new services and help corporations shift technology operations to the cloud.
Working with Accenture will help Amazon land new and larger services contracts. That may pose a bigger threat to traditional computer-services companies such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and International Business Machines Corp. as corporations look for cheaper and more efficient ways to outsource management of their technology.
I wouldn't say 'may pose' I'd say 'clear and present danger.'
We already know that IBM is rapidly shrinking its commitment to old style legacy ERP and is having to rethink the data center. HP, for all its many years' experience, is in such a mess, it is hard to know how any large buyer can seriously trust its operations to the once storied company.
Accenture on the other hand made bold moves the last year or so in both technology buys and commitments to digital transformation. It's only a few weeks ago that it shored up its Salesforce practice with the Cloud Sherpas buy. So when Accenture teams up with Amazon in this way then you know there has been a shifting of the sands.
The initial pitch is broad and sweeping but the initial services are more focused. Abbreviated from the blurbs:
Transformation Services Optimized for AWS: The business group will provide services to clients to move their existing applications to and develop new applications on AWS quickly, economically, and securely.
Analytics and Big Data Services, powered by AWS: Enterprise clients, especially those in regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services, are increasingly looking for more effective analytics-driven solutions. The Accenture Insights Platform will be expanded to integrate AWS data and analytics capabilities.
Accenture is quick to point out that AWS and Accenture have been working together for 10 years but this is by far the most far reaching expression of the relationship.
More to the point, Amazon Web Services is now looking more like the alternative enterprise cloud infrastructure provider of choice. It will face stuff competition from Microsoft's Azure and IBM but in the end, it will come down to who owns the relationship between buyer and vendor combined with the degree to which the Accenture deal enables fast track implementation based upon packaged services.