Jack Sepple, Senior Managing Partner, Accenture Cloud, discussed the impact of cloud on Accenture’s business and Industrial Internet trends with theCUBE co-hosts Jeff Kelly and Dave Vellante live at the GE Industrial Internet event, Innovation Day.

Defining its role in the company’s business, Sepple said that “cloud for Accenture is helping our clients cross all layers,” from architecture to business services.  “It’s a global practice,” he added, with implementations in 60 percent of Fortune 100 companies.

“We’ve moved from why [you] use the cloud to how you use the cloud,” Sepple said. Business units have recognized the value of cloud: “there is no doubt that our uptake and the amount of implementations, transformational implementations, have gathered steam in the past couple of years.”

Cloud adoption starts with the right incentives

When it comes to cloud adoption, enterprises are interested in two main issues. The first is the cost effectiveness question, “then security is right on top of that,” Sepple said, therefore Accenture spent a lot of time with early on assessments. The second issue is “how do I create new business opportunities on something like the cloud,” how can data and analytics be leveraged.

“We’ve got to figure out more ways to help them trial business models. Some of them will work and some won’t,” Sepple added.

• Securing the cloud transition

Commenting on the security aspect, Sepple said that public companies – that are attacked most often – spend the largest amounts of money in this area. “All these offerings are getting more mature. The more we’re using open source, the more communities help us do that. We see more back office business processes being used in the cloud.”

• Hadoop changes the way we do business

“Clearly, to leverage the industrial Internet, you really cannot do that without cloud,” Jeff Kelly stated, asking Sepple to comment on the convergence of cloud, Hadoop and real time analytics. Sepple said the “independence of solutions is important. We have to design to that. We’re designing to standards.”

“We see every business becoming a digital business.” The cloud, Hadoop, social, mobile – they will all converge to make businesses better. “What we’re trying to do here with GE, Pivotal, Amazon is purpose built solutions,” understand business cases and offer the right solutions with confidence, then integrate such solutions to provide business results.

Monetizing cloud services

Asked if companies will buy or use as a service the infrastructure needed for the industrial cloud, Sepple said “you will probably want to buy a majority of it. One of the items that’s key: the skill set to do all these new technologies is limited.” After buying a component, a company needs customization for it. “I see CIOs moving from being builders to being their own brokers,” he added.

Cloud offers a “big opportunity in the infrastructure area. It offers a freedom to us to operate on a newer capability,” Sepple stated. It also offers “an advantage in the platform as a service area. The new architecture offers the elasticity that we didn’t have before.”

Asked if businesses will reach a point where they would only keep the infrastructure that they have to and move everything else to the cloud, Sepple said: “I don’t think we’ll ever get to that full area. Some legacy will never go.” Components will be shared, and private cloud will still be a main component all the way to 2020. “It’s going to be a journey.”

“Service integration is key,” Sepple said. “Offering services is going to end up being key.”