Accenture will be able to help clients more rapidly move toward being ‘cloud-first’ — thanks to a $3 billion investment.
While not a cloud technology company, Accenture is known as a leading partner of most major cloud providers around the world. This investment will form Accenture Cloud First, described in the company’s press release as:
“a new multi-service group of 70,000 cloud professionals that brings together the full power and breadth of Accenture’s industry and technology capabilities, ecosystem partnerships, and deep commitment to learning and upskilling clients’ employees and to responsible business, with the singular focus of enabling organizations to move to the cloud with greater speed and achieve greater value for all their stakeholders at this critical time.”
Cloud First will be led by Karthik Narain, a tech industry veteran who most recently headed up Accenture Technology in North America.
Announcing @Accenture Cloud First, a new team of 70,000 backed by $3B investment – bringing our clients the full set of capabilities they need to become cloud leaders at speed and scale. https://t.co/Bxwmukdrzk
— Paul Daugherty (@pauldaugh) September 17, 2020
(Paul Daugh is Group Chief Executive – Technology & CTO at Accenture)
Cloud computing has seen a massive increase in demand — especially with the surge in remote working and need to cut costs, both as a result of COVID-19. Numbers from Gartner show that the worldwide public cloud services market is forecast to grow by 6.3% in 2020. The total in dollars? $257.9 billion, up from $242.7 billion in 2019.
As Accenture CEO Julie Sweet is quoted in Fortune’s CEO Daily newsletter, “today we are 20% in the cloud. We are moving to 80%…instead of happening in a decade, it is going to happen in five years.”
“This is the Henry Ford moment of the digital era,” she added.
In Accenture’s press release, Sweet emphasized how the pandemic has brought to light the importance of accelerating digital transformation across all organizations and industries.
“COVID-19 has created a new inflection point that requires every company to dramatically accelerate the move to the cloud as a foundation for digital transformation,” she says, “to build the resilience, new experiences and products, trust, speed, and structural cost reduction that the ongoing health, economic and societal crisis demands — and that a better future for all requires.”
