Swinging for the Fences (but Aiming for the Cloud)

The following post is a guest post from our friends at AWS Premier Consulting Partner and launch AWS Migration Partner Accenture.

By Anthony Harris, Principal Director, Accenture AWS Business Group Cloud Transformation Services Offering Lead & Chris Wegmann, Managing Director, Accenture AWS Business Group and AWS Practice Lead

In the 1988 film Bull Durham, Kevin Costner a seasoned minor league baseball player was hired to groom an up and coming young pitcher (Tim Robbins) for the majors. As a participant in the AWS Competency Program, Accenture is privileged to play a similar coach/advisor role to clients as they map their journey through the cloud migration space. The AWS Competency Program is designed to highlight members of the AWS Partner Network (APN) who have demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success in specialized solution areas. Our collaboration with AWS—through the Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG)—helps us lead the way.

As one of the first participants in the AWS Migration Competency program, Accenture is proud to be recognized by AWS for our public cloud capabilities. Accenture has spent 10+ years honing our public cloud migration skills, so this is a well-tested playing field for us. Achieving the AWS Migration Competency demonstrates our commitment to cloud migration and confirms our deep experience in enterprise migration.

More broadly, at Accenture, we are excited to be at the cutting edge of what can only be described as a public cloud revolution. Our commitment is to bring more automation to the migration process, helping organizations strengthen and improve their ability to get the most out of their public cloud ecosystem. Once a portfolio migration to AWS is successful, we help clients leverage deeper cloud capabilities to grow their business more quickly and cost effectively—and with greater agility.

Given the dynamic and rapid evolution of the market, there’s a fast-growing pool of cloud migration providers, practices, and tools. Accordingly, we think the time is appropriate for a company such as AWS to set an enterprise-grade migration bar to measure providers.

At the risk of understating the case, there are a lot of business and technical components for customers to consider as they migrate workloads to the cloud, and no single journey is the same (just as there is no single path a baseball player takes in a journey from the minor leagues to the majors). However, we’re finding more and more businesses committed to the AWS Cloud journey. We’ve clearly shifted away from a “should-I-move-to-cloud” mentality to “how-do-I-move-to-cloud” and “what-is-the-right-path-for-me.” Enterprises large and small are looking to navigate the journey smoothly, plan and architect a strategy, execute a migration at scale, and develop new cloud applications cost-effectively, using leading-edge IT tools.

Our Cloud Transformation Services for AWS strategy involves industrializing and optimizing enterprise-grade assets and factory models to simplify migration and transformation—lowering associated costs and accelerating new business value by developing cloud-native applications rapidly. Our factory delivery model offers multiple production lines allowing us to work with our clients on the right enterprise migration approach to meet their business and technology needs.

A C-Suite View

We are seeing a shift away from cloud technology as an IT discussion. Cloud is now part of a larger business discussion, no longer limited to only the CIO and CTO agenda. The entire C-Suite—not to mention the boardroom—see the benefits of public cloud, and they are demanding a move toward the flexibility and agility it can offer.

We see a number of common public cloud drivers in the market and across our large-scale enterprise client base, such as:

1. A need for greater agility and improved speed to market.
2. A need to differentiate and innovate while growing business revenue.
3. Purpose-driven incentives, such as lowering IT operational costs.
4. Timeline-driven incentives, from the need to shed a legacy data center to M&A activity.
5. Capacity issues preventing the business from getting what it needs from IT.

We’re also seeing more long-term thinking in the marketplace. While some companies still consider a simpler lift-and-shift approach to meet their specific drivers, more and more companies are seeking to optimize their applications for AWS either as a part of the initial migration—or after. If the desire is to optimize for AWS as a part of the migration, they want to refactor and re-architect, weave in DevOps across their strategic business applications, and use cloud to fundamentally transform their IT model.

Our offering can be part of an upfront agreement in which we optimize applications and move the enterprise to Mode 2 IT more affordably and quickly. It involves rapid, continuous development and integration to deliver enhanced and new business capabilities through the use of AWS services.

Clarity, Competency, and Commitment

Indeed, one of the great advantages of working with Accenture is that in addition to migration services, we also offer top-notch managed services – we are an audited AWS Managed Service Provider. With a public-cloud-first mentality, Accenture offers comprehensive hyperscale Managed Service Provider services, including:

• Delivery as-a-service—dialed up or down as needed to align with resource usage.
• Support for industry-leading DevOps tools and platforms.
• A wide range of infrastructure, platform and software resources from an ever-increasing pool of top technology and cloud providers.
• Consumption and resource management analytics.
• An extensible service catalog providing fast access to pre-approved virtual machines, workloads, enterprise-grade applications or services.

The essential benefits of working with us boil down to the competency to migrate smoothly and the clarity to cut through the complexities that can accompany a migration (and subsequent operate phase).

Our modular, flexible approach to large scale application migrations to AWS comprises five key components with the various factory production lanes available for application migration:

1. Strategy—shaping the direction of IT, taking advantage of cloud computing to maximize shareholder and business value, while controlling and redirecting IT spend.
2. Discovery and Architecture—confirming the scope of the migration, charting the high-level roadmap, defining the cloud architecture for the target environment, and creating or refining the business case.
3. Application Migration—can comprise up to three sub-steps:
   • Lift and Shift—scripted and automated with market-leading migration tools, requiring minimal remediation, testing, and business disruption.
   • Optimization—can be part of the initial application migration to cloud or can follow a lift-and-shift migration.
   • Re-platform—significant code remediation to make applications cloud- and DevOps-ready.
4. Application Development—focused on Liquid Application and new IT constructs optimized for AWS, creates factory capabilities to support new business value in the cloud.
5. Cloud Management—baked into the cloud journey from the outset, helping ensure a seamless transition and reduced risks.

As truly proud coaches in the public cloud major leagues, Accenture, through our investment with AWS in the Accenture AWS Business Group, is looking toward the future as we help clients bridge their old IT to the new.

Want to learn more about some of our customer migrations on AWS? Read about Talen Energy and Discovery Networks International.