October 06, 2015

Accenture Releases Enhanced Version of Accenture Cloud Platform

Latest release eases migration of enterprise workload to the cloud with new and enhanced features that improve cost-efficiency, agility, governance and control of cloud applications

NEW YORK; Oct. 6, 2015 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has released a new and enhanced version of the Accenture Cloud Platform that is designed to help organizations increase the operating efficiency, cost structure, governance and control of their cloud applications. They can also take greater advantage of the flexibility and economics of an As-a-Service operating model, where IT and business services are delivered on-demand via the cloud.

The Accenture Cloud Platform is a multi-cloud management platform that enables organizations to centrally manage all of their enterprise cloud resources – public and private – and automate and accelerate the delivery of cloud solutions. An open, scalable technical cloud platform that allows services to be ramped up or down as needed, the platform manages and integrates with technology from leading global cloud providers including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, among others.

The latest release of the Accenture Cloud Platform is designed to help organizations:

• ** reduce the time to implement new cloud solutions ** – It increases the pace of development and deployment of new business solutions, while decreasing overall time and cost to migrate legacy workloads to the public cloud.
• ** improve the cost efficiency and optimization of IT ** – It enhances resource usage to help reduce operational costs and improve ROI by providing better consumption and cost-management, enabling organizations to reduce their overall cloud costs by as much as 40 percent; and
• ** enhance the governance and control of cloud management ** – It centralizes cloud governance and control with analytics, cost controls and policy management that provide enhanced visibility, accountability and compliance without additional overhead costs.

“Organizations of all sizes are increasingly adopting As-a-Service operating models as they look for greater operational agility, and doing so requires the right cloud management tools,” said Jack Sepple, group technology officer & senior managing director, Cloud and Security at Accenture. “This release of the Accenture Cloud Platform improves organizational capabilities to manage cloud sprawl, reducing the time needed to deploy cloud resources while providing a greater ability to innovate and integrate new solutions into the cloud quicker than ever.”

Key features of the new release of the Accenture Cloud Platform that are available now, or slated to go live by November of this year, include:

• Cloud mover – Provides a simple way to request and automate virtual-machine migration, reducing the time to migrate legacy workloads from days or weeks to just minutes; reducing operating costs compared with running in traditional datacenters with outsourced IT.
• Cross cloud transparency – Lets users create and manage their own resource “tags” to organize data, resulting in more control of their data resources, enabling faster growth of their cloud footprint across clouds without the associated transparency, compliance and support issues that may arise.

• ServiceNow integration – Integrates with ServiceNow, giving users a fully integrated self-service IT service management (ITSM) experience. Providing advanced governance capabilities; automation; faster speed of service delivery; and, through improved self-service, a possible personnel costs reduction of as much as 25 percent. Select enhanced features of the new release of the Accenture Cloud Platform improve cloud economics and include:

• Cloud consumption control – Offers visibility into cost and utilization trends, while supporting governance, by setting quotas and limits on resources and budgets. For instance, users can reduce their development and test resources by up to 30 percent by turning them off during weekends and other low-usage periods.

• Cloud bill management – Lets users view their total bill from any of their cloud providers by providing consolidated billing from cloud providers, reducing the manual process of compiling and standardizing bills from multiple providers – resulting in a reduction of expenses by as much as 30-40 percent. The Accenture Cloud Platform has a global provider and data center footprint on six continents as well as strategic relationships with more than 150 alliance partners. Accenture has worked with hundreds of enterprise clients, using the platform to deliver and deploy thousands of cloud projects. For more information on the Accenture Cloud Platform, visit www.accenture.com/us-en/cloud-platform.