Accenture Cloud Platform at v3 - the Airbnb or Uber of cloud? Analyst: William Fellows 21 Jan, 2015 The Accenture Cloud Platform (ACP) is now at a v3 release. The first two iterations were mostly consumed inside Accenture, while ACP v3 is the systems integrator's branded cloud management platform and is available as a service to customers. Where 2014's focus was on building out ACP to be attractive to the DevOps audience, the focus for ACP in 2015 will be to build out the platform to target executives and business users. Accenture doesn't refer to ACP as a cloud broker it sees ACP as the Airbnb or Uber of cloud. The 451 Take The Accenture Cloud Platform provides a standardized shared service for delivering all aspects of managed cloud. This is not the usual way that systems integrators have done business traditionally, there are multiple customized flavors; ACP is a vanilla offering. With ACP v3, Accenture believes it is more than halfway on the journey to providing a complete cloud management platform. Business model The Accenture Cloud Platform is the integration giant's single largest investment and part of the firm's $400m overall investment in cloud technologies. Accenture claims to have worked on more than 8,000 cloud projects and to have more than 14,000 trained cloud professionals. Rather than build its own datacenters or create and operate its own public IaaS and hosting environments, Accenture chose an 'asset light' approach by leveraging a network of partners to deliver services when and where needed based on client requirements (this is an extension of its core business model). For a simpler customer experience, it remains as the 'one throat to choke' for its customers. Copyright 2015 - The 451 Group 1
Accenture Cloud Platform isn't a discreet business unit in its own right, but it supports each of Accenture's operating groups. Technology Launched in 2013, Accenture Cloud Platform is now at its v3 incarnation, and Accenture reckons the platform to be about halfway to being the end-to-end, full-service cloud management platform it has envisioned. Much of the enhanced ACP v3 functionality has been engineered by Accenture managing director Rodrigo Flores, who is responsible for architecture, product management and innovation labs. Flores is the former CEO of service catalog company newscale, which he sold to Cisco, becoming CTO of Cisco's Intelligent Automation Solutions, before joining Accenture in 2013. In Q4 2013, Accenture added more cloud integration options and unified billing analytics to broker, orchestrate, manage and govern multiple enterprise clouds from ACP. A new discovery engine and an exposed application programming interface allow users to access services either through the Accenture Cloud Platform portal, through applications directly, or through the native cloud provider console. They provide a centralized view of usage patterns and unified billing with access to in-depth analytics for visibility of overall cloud spending with budgetary control. ACP is delivered as a service to enterprises via a fully automated, self-service model. It can now manage on-premises private clouds built on OpenStack, Cisco InterCloud Systems and VMware vcloud Suite, as well as public clouds. It includes application and platform blueprinting to build a compute stack and deploy applications in the cloud including server, software, storage, network, images and firewall details. ACP enables multiple cloud services to be bundled, provisioned and deployed from a single model across public and private cloud providers while adhering to enterprise architecture guidelines and policies. It has automated, self-service and managed security services, including patching, backup, monitoring and the ability to set policies for networks, machine sizes and images with full integration to an enterprise directory to ensure authorized, role-based access. It provides central monitoring of service usage and delivery across multiple services and private and public clouds. ACP acts as a one-stop shop to request and provision preapproved cloud services, and provides policy management and approval workflow control, along with a suite of billing, chargeback and cost analytics, helping to make enterprise management and scaling of cloud services easier. Flores has a lot of experience incorporating ITIL into his work on service catalogs. As a consequence, ACP has an elaborate service-request function, and can encapsulate a customer's own business logic into the service-request form. When these are published to the catalog, they become orderable via Copyright 2015 - The 451 Group 2
a single click. The user can see what assets are live and available the service doesn't need to access a CMDB. ACP is self-service and is available as a fully automated system or with human operator steps required. Accenture finds that many firms require a human operator to authorize requests in order to retain control. Accenture pre-buys capacity from all of its cloud-provider partners Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Cisco InterCloud, NTT Communications, Orange Business Services and Verizon Cloud. It uses Zenoss for monitoring, as well as JBoss and other Red Hat open source tools. It is also developing its own tools for ACP and has now integrated about a dozen both its own and those it has OEMed. Customers variously want Accenture to manage the cloud supplier and the paper, or want to deal with the cloud provider themselves. ACP is specifically not a cloud broker, the firm says, although it has brokering aspects. (Indeed, Accenture developed and then shelved a tool for brokering in ACP that didn't work). In its view, the industry is a long way from the kind of real-time resource arbitrage implied by cloud brokering; however, ACP does carry out some of this for customers. It refers to ACP as a cloud management platform, and it regards ACP as being a kind of Airbnb or Uber for cloud. Accenture claims to have hundreds of customers on ACP oil and gas, media and entertainment, and financial services (non-regulated) are the key vertical markets for ACP. It says more than one-third of the media and entertainment companies it has surveyed plan to buy cloud services. It's seeing a shift from all-private cloud initiatives to hybrid models involving public and private clouds. With cloud, the trend in this sector is toward the greater use of transcoding services in the cloud, repurposing content for different devices. Competition The competitive landscape remains similar to last year. Rival systems integrators and global companies with competing ICT portfolios are Capgemini, CSC, Cognizant, Dell, Fujitsu, IBM, Infosys, HP and Wipro. Telcos such as CenturyLink, BT, Deutsche Telekom, NTT (also a partner), Orange and Verizon Terremark (also a partner) have deep pockets, and are increasingly moving into cloud services with in-house offerings. Most in this bunch have a holistic network visibility and application delivery product story that many in the cloud space aren't able to tell. Although they are also partners, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure compete directly for enterprise market share. SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses Copyright 2015 - The 451 Group 3
Many systems integrators view themselves as natural heirs to the future market demand for service-integration services, as well as the development and management of enterprise app stores and associated orchestration services. As such, they offer blended in-house and multi-vendor services. This future is not yet assured; however, ACP marks Accenture as a leader on this journey. ACP is a tool for digital business transformation, and part of the key to success will be Accenture's ability to reorganize itself in order to be able to deliver this. Opportunities Threats Accenture doesn't refer to ACP as a cloud broker it sees ACP as the Airbnb or Uber of cloud. The key challenges for systems integrators and outsourcers in the cloud are that smaller deals are available than they are used to and stagnant margin growth in the sector. Accenture has already addressed resource model limitations with an asset-light approach. Others such as CSC are doing the same. Copyright 2015 - The 451 Group 4
Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; 2015. This report was originally published within 451 Research's Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: www.451research.com Copyright 2015 - The 451 Group 5