Accenture Aligns with Microsoft on Hybrid Cloud: What You Need to Know

As a sign of the hybrid cloud computing times Accenture today announced it has extended its partnership with Microsoft (MSFT) to include an Accenture Hybrid Cloud Solutions for Microsoft Azure.

While Accenture has multiple cloud computing partnerships, Jack Sepple, senior managing director of Cloud and Infrastructure Services for Accenture, said the Microsoft cloud computing strategy is more conducive to hybrid cloud computing environments that need to span private clouds running on premise and public cloud services.

In general, Sepple says IT organizations are still challenged when it comes to migrating to the cloud. To many of them it represents new methodologies for managing workloads that many of them simply have not yet mastered yet. For the most part, most of the application workloads that do run in the cloud were born there, but Sepple said Accenture is starting to see IT organizations plan more to move existing workloads to the cloud in 2015.

The real issue, said Sepple, is that most of the current implementation of hybrid cloud computing architectures are of an “accidental” nature. Going into 2015, Sepple said Accenture expects to have more discussions with clients that are deliberately planning to deploy and manage hybrid cloud computing environments. In fact, a recent global survey conducted by Avanade, a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft, finds that 69 percent of organizations expect that hybrid cloud computing will be a strategic initiative in 2015.

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In that context, Sepple said Microsoft is a strategic partner because it enables instances of Microsoft Cloud OS based on Windows Server 2012 to run on Azure that can be more easily integrated with Windows Server 2012 running premise or on any other cloud service that Accenture has aligned itself with.

While Amazon Web Services may be the largest cloud platform at the moment as the lines between private and public cloud computing continue to dissipate Microsoft is betting that IT organizations will favor an Azure cloud that is a more natural extension of their existing Windows Server 2012 implementations. After all, that Microsoft Azure platform now only exposes a common set of application programming interfaces (APIs), it makes of use of everything from Microsoft Active Directory to Microsoft System Center 2012.

Naturally, it remains to be seen just how hybrid cloud computing scenarios will play out in 2015. But the one thing that is for certain is that hybrid cloud are well on their way to becoming the dominant form of cloud computing for the foreseeable future.