In life, leadership is best done by example. And Accenture PLC has put its money squarely where its mouth is, having migrated all of the constituent business-critical services to the public cloud.

“Accenture’s journey to the cloud is complete,” said Merim Becirovic (pictured, right), managing director at Accenture PLC. “But now we are this cloud continuum living in the cloud. And the thing we talk about is we have built our digital core in a cloud. We’re no longer dependent on data centers. And that has given us tremendous flexibility around enabling the business as it has grown significantly since we started this journey.”

Becirovic and Chris Wegmann (pictured, left), global technology and practice lead at Accenture’s AWS Business Group, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Walls at the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Accenture’s continuing top-down cloud transformation journey. (* Disclosure below.)

The rewards of a comprehensive overhaul

From a scaling point of view, building out that digital core in the cloud has allowed Accenture to expand its reach as a global IT organization now supporting a workforce of more than 720,000 people in around 130 different countries, according to Wegmann.

And from a growth and adaptability perspective, it’s allowed the company to weather the pandemic’s worst effects, chiefly through enabling efficient company-wide remote working capabilities.

“Without the strong digital core built on cloud, we couldn’t do that,” Wegmann explained. “We couldn’t add that number of people or make the changes that were needed during COVID to get people working from home. Whether it is the way we changed our business model or things like that, it was all enabled by cloud.”

Looking in-depth, Accenture structured its long-term journey as a migration of workloads first, followed by a modernization of processes. And it has yielded benefits, according to Becirovic.

“That’s proven very effective. Since we got that core in place, we were able to build off of that,” he said. “It would’ve taken a lot more time just to start with a modernization approach.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent. Neither Accenture PLC, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE