Accenture [ACN] yesterday said it would invest more than $400 million over the next two years in its cloud computing capabilities and training to increase the depth of services it can provide in four key areas.
The four areas of investment are in professional services, its existing ecosystem of industry alliances, enabling of its software and business process outsourcing offerings and business services, and implementation of its own cloud architecture.
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An Accenture spokeswoman told Defense Daily via email that the company is making the investments given federal priorities and other mandates calling for reliable, secure, dependable cloud services as well as other trends in the market.
Those trends include hybrid cloud environments where more than 35 percent of customer infrastructures will still be comprised of legacy components in 2020, the rapid rise of the Platform-as-a-Service, demand for greater public cloud security and the need for it to be stronger than private cloud security, and the fact that for now the company’s clients see the private cloud being the predominant cloud-based infrastructure.
“The adoption of safe, secure cloud computing environments presents an amazing opportunity for federal CIOs to find cost-effective solutions that will deliver long-term, transformational health benefits to their agencies,” Chris Smith, chief technology and innovation officer for Accenture Federal Services, said in a statement. “As an integral part of their IT strategies, cloud can make agencies more responsive, more flexible and better prepared to meet changing customer expectations.”
Accenture said that its investment includes expanded services on its Accenture Cloud Platform for public and virtual private cloud infrastructure, data decommissioning, software systems testing, and big data analytics in the cloud. The Cloud Platform supports an expanded portfolio of infrastructure providers including Amazon Web Services [AMZN], Microsoft Windows Azure [MSFT], Verizon Terremark [VZN] and NTT Communications [NTT].
Accenture said it has 7,900 professionals trained in cloud technologies and has worked on more than 4,000 cloud projects around the works, including the National Science Foundation, Department of Education, General Services Administration and the intelligence community.