Accenture launched Velocity, a jointly funded and co-developed platform with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), that optimizes business outcomes up to 50% faster by removing the complexity associated with building and operating enterprise-scale applications and estates in the cloud.

Velocity allows clients to adopt Accenture and AWS innovations more quickly based on the learnings from thousands of Accenture and AWS projects. Together, these repeatable solutions help clients adopt new AWS services without recreating time-consuming, labor-intensive work and recurring costs at the start of every project. Now, organizations can solve intricate industry-specific challenges to accelerate cloud success. By assimilating learnings from nearly 40 solutions for 16 industries with proven use-case relevance, Velocity also serves as a foundation for an expanded set of new, co-developed industry solutions.

"Last year, we announced a five-year vision with AWS to take companies further, faster in an era of compressed transformation. This year, we are delivering on a major step in our five-year investment to help our clients to grow and innovate across the cloud continuum for total business reinvention," said Karthik Narain, global lead of Accenture Cloud First. "Velocity will bring AWS-powered industry, cross-industry, and technology solutions to market faster, with more repeatability and at a lower cost. It's the essence of innovation powered by the shared experiences of Accenture and AWS."

"For years, Accenture and AWS have collaborated to combine our shared resources, technical capabilities, and industry knowledge to help customers unlock innovation, drive business value, and support growth through cloud adoption and transformation," said Matt Garman, senior vice president of sales, marketing and global services at AWS. "Velocity marks the next step in our collaboration as we continue to deliver innovation and industry-specific offerings that help customers move to the cloud faster than ever before."

Vodafone, a British multinational telecommunications company, worked with Accenture and AWS to move its digital business to the cloud and adopt a DevOps model, supported by serverless architecture and containerization on AWS.

"We remain focused on upgrading the customer experience iteratively and endlessly. Our work with Accenture and AWS has enabled Vodafone to not only scale seamlessly as consumer demand ebbs and flows but also deliver constant, incremental improvements at pace," said Ben Connolly, head of Cloud Engineering & UK Digital Engineering at Vodafone.

Available on a subscription basis, Velocity provides clients with cost-effective access to innovative features, including:

• A Technology Fabric - Velocity's pre-built and self-renewing capabilities with a growing library of design patterns quickly create enterprise-scale, cloud-first environments based on specific business imperatives, including a secure cloud foundation, a data platform and application building blocks.
• Accelerators - Industry, technical and independent software vendor (ISV) partner solutions snap into Velocity's Fabric as patterns and blocks of deployable code with automation, including pre-integration features optimized for the expanding suite of Amazon business solutions.
• Activators - Powered by joint Accenture and AWS delivery teams, strong ISV partnerships and rapid prototyping, Velocity Activators ease technology and talent hurdles with a comprehensive set of assets, methodologies and processes. Accenture's 27,000 AWS cloud specialists, who hold 34,000 AWS certifications, accelerate transformation by ideating, incubating and scaling for global impact.

Industry Solutions Powered by Velocity

Velocity arrives at a time when enterprises are migrating to the cloud under tremendous time and cost pressures to capture and grow market share. Accenture and AWS plan to expand their portfolio of differentiated solutions across industries to accelerate innovation powered by Velocity.

Ecopetrol, the largest company in Colombia and a leading integrated energy company in the Americas, recently launched a first-of-its-kind solution for water intelligence and management with Accenture and AWS using Velocity - a prime example of an industry solution that will help advance sustainability and operational efficiencies for other energy companies.

"By working with Accenture and AWS, we plan to create the world's first water intelligence and management solution, putting us on a path to achieve water neutrality. We now have Accenture industry insights and leading cloud capabilities from AWS," said Ernesto Gutiérrez de Piñeres, chief science, technology and innovation officer at Ecopetrol. "The Velocity platform will play a key role in accelerating our TESG (technology, environmental, social and governance) agenda, including our goals of reducing 66% of fresh water captured and zero discharges to surface water by 2045, improving the environment for the communities where we operate."