There aren’t many global corporations that have completed the digital transformation journey.

Providing a “how-to” example for wholesale migration to the public cloud is Accenture PLC, which started its lift-and-shift in 2015 and finished just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2019.

“Our journey into the public cloud is complete,” said Merim Becirovic (pictured, right), managing director of global IT enterprise architecture at Accenture. “We put a bow on that project a couple of years ago.”

Becirovic and Chris Wegmann (pictured, left), AWS business group technology and practice managing director at Accenture, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent Executive Summit. They discussed best practices for cloud migration and the benefits of “living in the cloud.” (* Disclosure below.)

Accenture AWS Business Group lays down the welcome mat to cloud

Being in the cloud has opened tremendous doors for Accenture as a business, according to Becirovic.

“It’s fundamentally a different place we live in today and where we were before we were in the cloud,” he said.

Instrumental in building that “different place” has been Amazon Web Services Inc. The Accenture AWS Business Group formed six years ago as Accenture was starting its cloud journey, and Wegmann explained that Becirovic and the company’s internal information technology department was its first customer.

“At Accenture, we always kind of harvest from internally what we’re doing,” Wegmann said.

In the two years since Accenture “put a bow” on its digital transformation, the company has been working to perfect its internal cloud strategy, reducing reliance on virtual machines and traditional technology and replacing it with cloud native, containerized applications to make its operations more efficient — all while helping customers manage their own cloud migrations.

In the past year, that focus has narrowed to helping companies that were not ready technologically when COVID hit. The goal was to help them “come out of the pandemic stronger,” according to Wegmann. By leveraging “all the AWS assets and capabilities and services to truly speed their transformation,” Accenture guides customers past cloud migration and modernization into “the cloud continuum,” he added.

It’s common for organizations to be scared about the ongoing cultural implications of cloud adoption, according to Becirovic, who shared that Accenture had the same concerns.

“The teams were extremely nervous, and they were confident that we could never be as good in the cloud as we were on site,” he said.

Those fears were unfounded. Six years later, Accenture continues to reap the rewards of being in cloud.

“We’re running such a highly efficient machine right now that we’re still able to continue to eke out savings even two years after the program is complete,” Becirovic stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent Executive Summit. (* Disclosure: Accenture PLC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Accenture nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE