Accenture (NYSE:ACN) announced today it has collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on new end-to-end cloud migration and management services to help enterprise clients move from cloud pilots to enterprise-wide deployments in the AWS Cloud. The new services – which span strategy development, to running processes fluidly – are designed to increase transparency and confidence for a broad-scale enterprise migration to cloud, while helping to simplify and speed the process.

Launched today, the Accenture Enterprise Application Migration Service for the AWS Cloud helps clients evaluate which applications should be moved to the cloud, and when, by providing a practical roadmap and scalable methodologies for moving large legacy application portfolios to AWS. As part of Accenture’s broader enterprise application migration capabilities, the service also provides comprehensive testing services to quickly get applications up and running in the cloud.

New cloud management services for AWS products and services are available via the Accenture Cloud Platform, a centralized management control framework for brokering, orchestrating, managing and governing enterprise cloud solutions. The platform provides fully-automated, self-service management capabilities for AWS products and services, including advanced billing analytics, patching, anti-virus, backup and blueprinting capabilities that enable multiple services to be bundled, provisioned and deployed within a set governance framework.

Also announced today, the Accenture Center of Excellence for AWS Cloud, based in Seattle, is dedicated to developing new industry-focused assets and skills to ease the adoption of cloud computing in the enterprise market.

“While enterprises continue to express interest in moving toward enterprise-wide cloud deployments, they’re often held back by the uncertainty and perceived risk of migrating and managing their legacy applications in the cloud,” said Jack Sepple, senior managing director of Cloud and Infrastructure Services for Accenture. “Our expanded relationship with AWS and collaboration on solutions allows us to eliminate the what, when and how associated with this process by providing the management services and enterprise-grade support via the Accenture Cloud Platform to help clients achieve greater flexibility and save both time and resources.”

“We continue to see cloud adoption accelerating, with customers migrating a wide variety of enterprise and mission-critical workloads to AWS,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of AWS. “The work that Accenture is doing to help customers analyze their existing environment, assess any potential risks with their legacy apps, outline the benefits cloud will bring to their businesses, and then roadmap the entire journey is helping customers to more rapidly realize the agility, scale, and cost savings of AWS.”

As an early adopter of the Accenture Enterprise Application Migration Service for AWS, Discovery Networks International worked with Accenture to assess its online architecture and determine the suitability of migrating its portfolio to AWS. Operating one of the most extensive international television and content businesses in the media industry, Discovery Networks International wanted a more scalable, flexible and cost-effective hosting solution for its digital consumer-facing content platform – without compromising security and availability. When analyzing traffic patterns within the existing architecture, it became clear that there was a large fluctuation in traffic within any 24-hour period, which supported the benefits of moving to a fully elastic cloud architecture for the world’s #1 pay television provider.

Accenture managed the application migration, AWS environment configuration, testing and production deployments – all based on Accenture’s cloud architecture blueprint. With its new cloud hosting capability, Discovery Networks International has lowered costs, increased agility, and reduced potential future capital outlay.

“The Accenture Enterprise Application Migration Service enabled us to shift seamlessly to AWS, which not only improved our cost efficiencies by 70 percent, but gave us the ability to launch new, value-added services quickly and at scale,” said David Schafer, senior vice president of Digital Media at Discovery Networks International. “Changes to infrastructure that used to take weeks can now be made in just hours or days, and the elastic cloud architecture enables us to grow as demand increases. Online content like the award-winning site we launched for the series MANHUNT, which returns next year, engaged and reached audiences worldwide.”

Building on the relationship with AWS, which first began in 2006, Accenture will be able to deliver a growing number of digital solutions and business services on AWS to clients with the enterprise support, security and integrity they expect from traditional hosting, but with greater agility. With professional technologists and AWS certified solution architects, Accenture has the experience needed to help transition and manage enterprise applications in the cloud.

This announcement is part of Accenture’s investment of more than $400 million in cloud technologies, capabilities and training by 2015 to focus on delivering the right cloud services from its network of providers, as well as blending its own industry solutions and innovations with third party offerings. Accenture has worked on more than 8,000 cloud computing projects for clients, including nearly 75 percent of the Fortune Global 100, and has more than 14,000 professionals trained in cloud computing.

For more information about Accenture and AWS click here.

About Accenture

Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with more than 305,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$30.0 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2014. Its home page is www.accenture.com.