Accenture Runs on Microsoft—One of the Largest Installations in the World

Accenture works with a wide range of ecosystem technology companies in our quest to drive enterprise-wide digital transformation. Among these companies is Microsoft, with whom Accenture has had a more than two-decade-long relationship. Our teams are in regular communication with each other on how to drive better technology and business value from Microsoft’s products and services. Accenture also equips our people with the latest Microsoft technologies—so much so, that Accenture has become a market leader in the adoption of Microsoft technology and has one of the largest installations of Microsoft products in the world.

The Microsoft technologies that are helping Accenture improve enterprise productivity, collaboration, and innovation at scale and in the cloud are highlighted below. They enable us to ultimately better deliver value to our clients. 

Microsoft Office 365. Getting more than 400,000 people empowered with the latest Microsoft Office capabilities involved having to migrate Accenture’s critical collaboration capabilities to the cloud, a trailblazing and highly complex effort. The migration of the shared sites alone involved more than 40 terabytes of data. Our IT teams needed to maintain a smooth integration of services during the transition from on premise to cloud platforms. Accenture was the first, large enterprise migration at the time. Today we have more than 450,000 Accenture mailboxes on Microsoft Exchange and more than 19,000 Microsoft SharePoint sites hosted in Microsoft’s Office 365 service, as we continue to focus on achieving Accenture-wide scale, speed, and new security features.

Microsoft Skype for Business. Virtually the entire Accenture workforce as well as many partners, contractors, and 800 clients—are enabled with Skype for Business. To move from Lync to Skype for Business required Accenture, Microsoft and Avanade to fine-tune Lync’s functions for the requirements of Accenture’s global workforce. Additionally, large investments in technology and infrastructure have made Accenture’s Skype for Business the largest and most stable such platform in the business world. Nearly all Accenture conferencing—99.9 percent—now takes place via Skype for Business. We are averaging a staggering 309 million Skype audio and 42 million Skype video minutes per month. We’ve also reduced the average cost of an Accenture audio conference call by 83 percent.

Microsoft OneDrive for Business. OneDrive for Business offers a new way of working, including moving all of an employee’s documents to OneDrive—freeing up PC storage. With OneDrive, Accenture employees can access files regardless of the device they are using. Access is available through company-provided PCs and IT-managed tablets and mobile phones. An important aspect to our OneDrive initiative was implementing secure cloud storage based on OneDrive to enable easy access to data from multiple devices, helping to reduce the risk of data loss and theft, and enabling secure file sharing with clients.

Microsoft Windows 10. Accenture wanted to capitalize on the benefits offered by Windows 10 along with Office 2016 and OneDrive for Business. This combination offered significant business value in new capabilities, enhanced security, as-a-service model, as well as supported Accenture’s cloud-first strategy. To upgrade as quickly as possible, we created a “two-lane” deployment approach. The first lane was to deploy all new PCs with Windows 10 and give a manual upgrade option for early adopters. The second lane addressed existing PCs running Windows 7 and enabling employees to use an In-Place Upgrade tool and process that uses OneDrive for Business for file distribution to perform the upgrade to Windows 10. This innovative tool, which we developed, has been key to enabling deployments at scale and pace. Approximately 320,000 employees have upgraded to Windows 10, and we’ll be at 400,000 next year. Accenture is now the largest consumer of Windows 10.

Microsoft Azure. Accenture is evolving our SAP ERP to handle future growth and needs. At the same time, we are applying a cloud-first, cloud-only principle for all new applications. Given these drivers, we are migrating our SAP applications to the cloud, including SAP Business Warehouse (BW) on HANA, which we chose to migrate to Microsoft Azure. Together, Accenture, Microsoft, and SAP undertook a move of Accenture’s entire 7 TB BW landscape and architecture from an on-premise data center to a public cloud solution that had never been proven at a company as large as Accenture.

I am thrilled Accenture is providing our mobile, global workforce with services and capabilities that enable them work in new and leading ways. As a company that leads in the New, Accenture will continue to deploy new capabilities as they are made available and push the envelope in collaborating on new possibilities with Microsoft. Over the next few months, I’ll dive deeper into the details on these initiatives and I look forward to a conversation with you about our work with Microsoft.

Until then, is your organization pushing the envelope with Microsoft? If yes, tell me more about it.

Andrew

You can follow me on Twitter at @andrewxwilson. 

Andrew Wilson is the chief information officer at Accenture. 

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• Accenture Runs on Microsoft
• Accenture demonstrates the art of the possible with Microsoft technology