Dive Brief:
- Accenture Edge secured a deal with AWS to deliver cloud infrastructure, AI and security services to small and midsize businesses, the two companies announced this week. The alliance builds on the IT consulting and service firm’s existing AWS partnership but focuses on the midmarket business unit Accenture launched in June.
- “Midmarket organizations have always been part of Accenture’s client base, but now they have access to offerings designed specifically for their scale, not adapted from enterprise solutions built for someone else,” Chris Wegmann, CTO and practice managing director of the Accenture AWS business group, told Channel Dive in an email.
- Accenture Edge for AWS launched with six offerings available through the hyperscaler’s cloud marketplace, Wegmann said. They include AI data discovery and virtual machine migration, cloud spend management and security automation tools, as well as a suite of cloud-based contact center agents.
Dive Insight:
Accenture Edge’s AWS deal addressed two strategic goals for the global systems integrator. Accenture can expand its footprint in the SMB market via cloud modernization services and deliver to AWS a customer base coveted by hyperscalers and other large technology vendors.
“Companies in this segment face many of the same technology, data, AI, cybersecurity and productivity challenges as large enterprises, but they often need solutions that are faster to deploy, more repeatable and right-sized for their scale,” Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said during a June earnings call. “This segment is also an important priority for our ecosystem partners, which see strong demand and want to partner with us because we can bring scale, consistency and delivery quality to a fragmented services market.”
Partners are key to unlocking midmarket revenue. Despite an ongoing surge in hyperscaler AI investments that skirt the channel, partners will own two-thirds of global tech spending this year, according to Omdia, a Channel Dive sister company. The analyst firm expects the IT market to generate over $6 trillion in revenue in 2026. Nearly one-third is expected to come from the midmarket, where the channel’s share is nearly 80%.
Accenture built its midmarket organization through acquisitions, rolling up several IT firms with established SMB practices. The business unit’s CEO, Srini Subramanian, came to Accenture in 2023, when Accenture bought Inspirage, an Oracle service provider with a solid midmarket base.
One of the first projects credited to Accenture Edge was a customer experience platform for Ontario’s all-electronic 407 ETR toll highway to handle billing, payments, account updates and service requests. NeuraFlash, a Salesforce-focused midmarket consulting firm that Accenture acquired last year, built the cloud-based contact center on AWS infrastructure, according to the partnership announcement.
"What matters for midmarket organizations isn't just access to technology, it's seeing returns from it,” Chris Sullivan, VP of Americas and industry partner sales and development at AWS, said in the release.
