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Recently, following a change in the direction of their corporate culture, Microsoft have begun a series of partnerships with other businesses in order to boost their competitiveness in the global market. This less bullish approach to affairs has paid dividends in the short-term, at least with regards to the price of their shares, however it is unusual for Redmond to act in this manner.
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One of the oldest Microsoft partnerships is with global management consultancy firm Accenture. In the past the two firms have worked on such new ventures as Avanade, a popular business-solutions technology firm. Now they have announced the arrival of a new such product, the ‘Accenture Hybrid Cloud Solution for Microsoft Azure’.
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Intended to lessen the delay in communications between different levels of management within a business among other uses, the solution is currently being piloted at Freeport McMoRan, an international natural resources firm, in order to prototype and test an new industrial version of the ‘Internet of Things’. Intended to improve the efficiency of mining operations, supervisors can now react to changes in mining production in real-time, allowing for adjustments on the fly as necessary.
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As Pierre Nanterme, CEO of Accenture states:
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“With new demands being placed on IT departments every day, enterprises need to smartly connect their infrastructure, software applications, data and operations capabilities in order to become agile, intelligent, digital businesses. This unique collaboration with Microsoft and Avanade is one of Accenture’s most strategic and important initiatives for driving enterprise-wide cloud adoption.”
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The two firms are co-funding and engineering the project together, working with Avanade in order to deliver it to customers. Satya Nadella sums up the benefits of the new solution as such,
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“The Microsoft cloud, combined with Accenture’s industry knowledge and implementation expertise, accelerates our customers’ cloud adoption and unlocks new benefits, including powerful new applications, data-driven insights and increased productivity”
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The new service offers advice from Accenture regarding delivery of client cloud goals, personnel from Avanade to help implement solutions and a combination of services from Microsoft Azure offering a great degree of flexibility and power.
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With Microsoft keen to remain competitive well into the future, it is likely that this kind of deep co-dependency on different projects will continue, though only time will prove their longevity.
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Will this new product have implications for your firm? Let us know in the comments below.
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