Deloitte will draw on cloud skills from five Australian IT businesses acquired over the past two years as part of its launch of an Amazon Web Services strategy unit, which will have 2500 practioners globally.
The business unit aims to "de-risk" migration of enterprise applications to the Amazon public cloud, in particular the SAP HANA family, which includes S/4 HANA and BW/4 HANA. Deloitte has built more than 20 pre-configured analytics solutions powered by SAP HANA and AWS.
The performance requirements of SAP HANA in-memory computing will be supported courtesy of AWS memory-optimised X1 instances and will leverage the public cloud leader's "global scale and advanced capabilities and services".
Kevin Russo, Deloitte consulting lead partner, technology, strategy and architecture, said: “A key focus of our AWS collaboration is to accelerate clients’ digital core transformation through SAP S/4HANA. This will modernise their ERP technology and de-risk cloud migration."
Robert Hillard, Deloitte consulting managing partner, expanded on the combined offer.
"Deloitte already delivers innovations for clients on AWS in areas such as blockchain technologies, cybersecurity and industry-specific analytics. The strategic relationship with AWS augments this work by providing clients with the full spectrum of digital core, analytics and enterprise cloud needs.
"It supports our Australian practice [to] offer a fully integrated, end-to-end technology practice to assist clients with every aspect of technology design, build, implementation and protection, through every stage of their growth.”
In a statement, Deloitte said it would lean on expertise generated through a spate of acquisitions in the Australian channel.
Its most recent Australian deal – Plenary Networks in October 2016 – followed an M&A blitz across the cloud, infrastructure and security fields.
In June 2015, Deloitte acquired Dataweave, a Sydney-based Oracle integrator and four-time CRN Fast50 company. Dataweave brought identity and access management prowess, as did the September 2015 purchase of Sydney-based Qubit Consulting.
Melbourne-based Cloud Solutions Group was next to be acquired in November 2015, followed by the API experts at Melbourne-based Sixtree in July 2016.
Cloud consultants
Deloitte hopes the new AWS practice will sway enterprise customers to trade their on-premises hardware for "a scalable and cost-effective AWS environment, removing the need to own and manage the underlying technology infrastructure".
The partnership marks the latest in a string of moves by big consultancies to respond to changing customer demands, away from multi-year software projects and toward more nimble adoption of cloud solutions. PwC, for instance, announced a partnership with Google back in 2014 to drive uptake of the search giant's software-as-a-service suite among enterprise customers.
Accenture snapped up one of the world's biggest Google and Salesforce integration partners, Cloud Sherpas, in September 2015 as part of its pivot to the cloud. Accenture soon after announced a joint venture with AWS.
KPMG last month announced that "the days of 18 months of mega implementations of back office systems are long gone" as it took Australian life insurance and wealth management provider Clearview to Oracle ERP Cloud.
Terry Wise, vice president of AWS worldwide partner ecosystem, said: "Deloitte’s deep experience and services, SAP’s powerful data management solutions, and the scale and flexibility of the AWS cloud will be an invaluable combination for enterprises looking to become more agile, create new efficiencies and grow their businesses.”
In Australia, the news comes as rival monolithic application provider, Oracle, announced it would bring its own cloud down under. Oracle Cloud Platform will have a local point of presence in an the Sydney data centre of an unnamed co-location partner.
Until now, customers that wanted Australia-based hosting for Oracle needed to migrate the system into a third-party public cloud, often AWS. News Corp was one of the most high-profile Australian companies to migrate its Oracle JD Edwards ERP into AWS, with the help of two-time CRN Fast50 company Myriad IT.
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