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.
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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
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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
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Weaknesses
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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.
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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
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