Accenture’s Cloud Business Already at $1 Billion-a-year, Aims to Become Industry’s Cloud Broker
April 29, 2013
Grazed from Forbes. Author: Reuven Cohen.
I was just reading an interesting post over at Information Age which outlines Accenture ACN +3.14%’s ambitious plan to position itself as the IT industry’s “cloud broker.” The strategy is part of a broader plan that sees the consulting company investing upwards of $400 million in new cloud computing capabilities. According to the story, the Accenture Cloud Platform will be part of what the company describes as a plan to grow its more than 6,700 cloud focused experts and related cloud services.
The term cloud broker seems to be thrown around a lot lately. TechTarget defines it as “a third-party individual or business that acts as an intermediary between the purchaser of a cloud computing service and the sellers of that service. The broker’s role may simply be to save the purchaser time by researching services from different vendors and providing the customer with information about how to use cloud computing to support business goals. In such a scenario, the broker works with the customer to understand work processes, provisioning needs, budgeting and data management requirements. After the research has been completed, the broker presents the customer with a short list of recommended cloud providers and the customer contacts the vendor(s) of choice to arrange service.”…
The primary benefit to a broker approach to cloud computing is it gives enterprise customers a single point of contact for many different cloud providers from a trusted partner. Something that lately seems to be a recurring problem and is often refereed to as “Cloud Sprawl.” By offering its army of cloud experts as well as a platform in which to manage this type of sprawl, Accenture hopes to position itself in the middle of a potentially major shift in how enterprises view and utilize IT. This is in many ways similar to the outsourcing transition that occurred in the 1990s…
Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2013/04/29/accentures-cloud-business-already-at-1-billion-a-year-aims-to-become-industrys-cloud-broker/