Accenture Plc and Amazon Web Services Inc. are deepening their business partnership with an expanded menu of services announced today at Amazon’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.

The services, which range from cloud migration to blockchain deployment, are provided by Accenture’s AWS Business Group. That practice, launched three years ago, now employs 2,100 certified AWS professionals, 400 of whom are dedicated to building cloud architecture for enterprise clients.

Accenture is moving up the stack with its new service offerings, reflecting infrastructure-as-a-service providers’ increased focus on moving beyond virtual server deployment to business services. “Everything we introduced today is about how to leverage innovation with the cloud,” said Chris Wegmann (pictured), global managing director of AABG and Accenture’s AWS practice.

Specifically, the offerings include:

• A new AWS Applied Intelligence Center of Excellence in Seattle, which will service industry- and domain-specific use cases for machine learning and artificial intelligence technology;
• A service called LaunchPad that helps clients achieve digital transformation benefits beyond cost savings;
• Additional tools, templates and industry-specific services related helping clients better leverage existing assets with machine learning; and
• Blockchain Express, which is described as an accelerated six-week engagement that applies Accenture services to help clients get up and running with distributed ledger technologies.

Accenture’s historic strength in business process outsourcing has created a natural avenue of expansion into cloud, Wegmann said. The AWS partnership “continues to fit well with what Accenture offers in terms of value and tools,” he said. Cloud vendors’ move up the value chain, “enables us to focus on value creation and innovation versus worrying about bits and bytes.”

Accenture also has relationships with other major cloud infrastructure providers, but Wegmann implied that the Amazon relationship is special. “We may offer similar capabilities on other platforms, but we built these specifically as part of our partnership with AWS,” he said.

Although the term “digital transformation” has become something of a buzzword over the past couple of years, Wegmann said enterprises are serious about the concept, and cloud is an essential element. “You can’t achieve digital transformation without cloud,” he said.

Cloud automation fuels innovation, enabling organizations to “fail fast” and learn from experience. “Anyone doing anything digital without using cloud is probably not set up for success,” he said.

Separately, Accenture and Educational Testing Service Inc. announced that they’ve signed a multiyear partnership agreement under which Accenture will migrate and manage much of ETS’s infrastructure to the AWS cloud. ETS said it will use Accenture to procure cloud capacity, manage the company’s migration to the cloud and secure its cloud environment, enabling the education company to introduce new assessment, research and related services more rapidly.

Photo: SiliconANGLE