Accenture brings an industrialized approach to global saleforce.com deployments

What does it take to deliver cloud computing on a global scale? Accenture began tackling this challenge with salesforce.com in 2004, after the world’s largest consulting company realized cloud computing would transform the world’s businesses. The first global systems integrator to partner with salesforce.com, Accenture contributed expertise for improving businesses processes that had been honed over nearly a century, as well as its longstanding relationships with the Fortune 500.
 

Innovation in the cloud

“We’ve seen a lot of big changes in the technology industry, but this is really the Big Kahuna,” Paul Daugherty, chief technology architect, said while showcasing Accenture’s approach at Dreamforce in November 2009. “Cloud computing is a paradigm that’s changing how businesses and governments operate,” he believes.
 

Accenture and salesforce.com witnessed this change while working together on more than 100 engagements at 70 enterprises. Even now, in the midst of a global economic crisis, executives are interested in investing in cloud computing because of the advantages it will bring them during an upturn, Daugherty said.
 

Cloud computing in general and the Force.com platform in particular can lower operational costs and improve employee productivity, while unleashing innovation through rapid application development. For example, a global insurance company working with Accenture was able to design a Force.com application and test it with 1,200 users in just 4 months. The pilot was followed by a full-fledged deployment to 100 countries at a record speed of approximately 8 weeks per region.
 

The Force.com Factory

“Our competitive advantage is that we created an industrialized approach to solution design and development using proven assets specifically for salesforce.com that make it faster to deliver salesforce.com solutions,” said David Jones, business development director at Accenture.
 

The Force.com Factory, also known as Accenture’s Cloud Application Factory, offers “rules, tools, and schools” to accelerate a company’s adoption of cloud computing. Everything from delivery toolkits to integration frameworks reduces risks and ensures the success of highly complex, global deployments. For example, some companies have 10,000 applications that could conceivably run in the cloud. An automated “sustainability assessment” helps determine the business case for cloud computing on an application-by-application basis. The Force.com Factory can also generate work plans and estimate timelines for rebuilding applications on salesforce.com’s cloud-based multitenant architecture.
 

In Japan, a project to rebuild 400 Lotus Notes applications for Lawson, Inc. would have taken 1 year to achieve with on-premises software. Accenture and salesforce.com completed the project in only 2 months and at ⅕ the cost of traditional development.

A global delivery network

With global deployment, it helps to have engineering resources available around the world. Accenture has more than 50 facilities, staffed by approximately 81,000 professionals. “We’re the only global provider to offer salesforce.com application management on an outsourced basis,” Jones said.

Accenture tapped these resources to implement a recent deal it won with salesforce.com at SFR, a mobile communications company in France. “Together we’re helping SFR align sales processes and integrate legacy systems with salesforce.com following an acquisition,” Jones explained.

In 6 months, an offshore development team was able to migrate hundreds of thousands of records stored in data warehouses, overcoming complex data migration, data cleansing, and integration challenges. The result: a streamlined sales process and new user interface that improves the efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity of the SFR sales team.

There is no limit to the cloud

Both Accenture and salesforce.com have a heritage in customer relationship management (CRM), which along with sales force automation (SFA) was among the first business applications to move to the cloud. Both companies have since extended the benefits of cloud computing to customer service contact centers and beyond.

Accenture’s B2B Contact Center solution, which incorporates salesforce.com’s Service Cloud technology, reduces the time it takes to serve a customer while enhancing the customer’s experience. “Together with salesforce.com, we’re extending the benefits cloud computing brought to CRM to other areas of the business—human resources, asset tracking, supply chain management, and contract management,” Jones said. According to Jones, “Accenture will continue to lead the market with salesforce.com. We‘re focused on shaping the future of cloud computing together with salesforce.com.”

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