Accenture has launched the Accenture Cloud Platform, which offers services and solutions designed to help organizations integrate and manage the hybrid cloud environments spanning across multiple vendor platforms.

It said the news platform will provide flexibility and support for emerging technologies to allow business clients to get more value from cloud computing.

Accenture said the launch represents an important step in its cloud strategy, and reaffirms the company’s intent to provide cloud brokering and orchestration services that are growing in importance to clients. 

As part of this strategic initiative, Accenture is investing more than US$400m 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.

As part of its overall investment, it has created expanded services on the Accenture Cloud Platform, including public and virtual private cloud infrastructure, data decommissioning, software systems testing and big data analytics solutions in the cloud.

According to the Accenture Technology Vision 2013 report, digital technology has become a strategic imperative and a tool of competitive intent for businesses today. 

Supported by the cloud, technology trends like mobile, social collaboration and big data are changing the landscape as an increasing number of businesses go digital. 

Accenture said its cloud platform provides a secure, scalable, and enterprise-ready cloud integration system to support these critical changes. It provides management and control over cloud services that are being delivered to clients, whether by Accenture or from a third party provider such as Microsoft, SAP and others.

Accenture said it has already worked on more than 4,000 cloud projects for clients, including over half of the Fortune Global 100, and has more than 6,700 professionals trained in cloud. 

According to industry analyst firm IDC¹, the total market size for cloud will grow from approximately $40bn in 2012 to $98bn in 2016. This includes projections for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to reach $37bn, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to reach $30bn, System Infrastructure Software-as-a-Service to reach $20bn and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to reach $10bn by 2016.