In a move aimed squarely at IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) linked up with Accenture PLC to form a business group to help enterprise customers move to the Amazon cloud.

The alignment with Accenture, the world’s largest consulting firm with a $32 billion in 2014 revenues and 336,000 employees, gives AWS both the scope and reach to compete with legacy heavyweights. Companies like IBM and HP have been touting their giant field service operations as an advantage of using their cloud services, but it’s going to be harder to make that case now that AWS and Accenture are agreeing to “invest significant resources over multiple years,” including training 1,500 people in the first year.

The deal wasn’t exactly a bolt from the blue. The two companies have been working together for a decade on cloud migration projects. However, Amazon has clearly anointed Accenture as the most-favored son, at least for now.

The companies said the business group will offer integrated consulting and technology solutions to “help organizations evolve long-established internal processes, reorganize internal IT teams, re-tool legacy solutions and effectively extract value from the data their businesses are collecting.” Among the services provided will be business process re-engineering, application migration services and architecture design and application development for the AWS cloud platform.

The feature set is reminiscent of that supplied by Accenture and others in the 1990s during the outsourcing craze. In that case, outsourcing providers would purchase a customer’s equipment and hire a large number of their IT personnel in exchange for a long-term outsourcing deal.

That trend is reversing, however, as many companies are now bringing back some or all of their outsourced operations because technology is too important to the business. Instead, they’re looking to outsource the tech without the people.

The companies said the joint venture will initially target transformation services and big data analytics, both powered by the AWS platform. The idea is to help enterprise customers become more efficient at the same time they move infrastructure to the cloud. The Accenture Insights analytics platform gets a boost from the deal. It will be expanded to integrate AWS data and analytics capabilities.

The big legacy company still have a sharp arrow in their quivers, however. Amazon has yet to outline a policy for hybrid cloud, or even say it plans to have one. With hybrid clouds expected to comprise the majority of enterprise cloud deployments for the foreseeable future, that still works in IBM’s and HP’s favor.