Accenture transforms its infrastructure using RISE with SAP on Azure

As one of the world’s largest professional services companies, Accenture helps its customers transform every part of their business by bringing together all applications, services, and data in the cloud to create a strong digital core. With this foundation, all business areas can be unified through automated, intelligent processes that also integrate customers and partners into the value chain. Business models can be quickly implemented or adapted, with product development and response times shortened. “This helps Accenture customers adapt and innovate rapidly, leading to revenue growth while meeting the demands of a rapidly changing business landscape,” says Eli Lambert, Managing Director of Global IT at Accenture.

By helping companies build their digital core, they can “reimagine how they work to unlock innovation and new opportunities for their own employees, customers, and shareholders,” says Lambert. As it supports clients in meeting the modern pace of change, Accenture knows it also must continuously assess itself to ensure the company stays at the forefront of advanced technology. 

Anand Raval, Director of SAP Digital Transformation at Accenture, says, “We’re constantly innovating, because what’s true today wasn’t true yesterday and it won’t be true tomorrow.” To continue to extend its cutting-edge solution and service offerings to customers, Accenture needed a transformation of its own—one that would continue to build on client trust and win new business. “We wanted to enhance our infrastructure and unify operations to support more simplified and accelerated transformation for our current and future customers, while giving us even more agility, security, and interoperability,” says Raval.

Simplifying infrastructure management

To strengthen its infrastructure, Accenture wanted to use RISE with SAP for its services and functionality designed to support enterprises. It also wanted to work with an industry-leading cloud for SAP provider that could help it extend and innovate through cloud services. Lambert says Microsoft understood what Accenture needed for optimal performance. “It was a no-brainer for us to work with Microsoft as a service provider to power infrastructure and our move to the cloud,” says Lambert. “We chose RISE with SAP on Microsoft Azure as a comprehensive solution to enhance security, interoperability, and innovation and to simplify infrastructure management.” Azure is SAP-certified, designed to help businesses run all their SAP processes and applications. 

With SAP applications often among the most business-critical for a company, any change introduces risk. But for Accenture, the risk of not driving SAP to the cloud felt greater than the risk of inaction. Using RISE with SAP on Azure, Accenture knew it could gain greater agility and optimized operational costs through embedded intelligence and real-time insights. Accenture built off its existing multiyear cloud migration with RISE with SAP, including SAP S/4HANA, SAP Business Warehouse, Solution Manager, and more. Accenture chose Azure as its trusted cloud environment and managed the transition through RISE with SAP, which provided a smooth and secure shift. 

Raval says Accenture chose Azure for its RISE with SAP implementation to bring together the best of both worlds: SAP’s powerful business applications and the scalable infrastructure and services of Azure. “We saw the agility, the ability to scale, the resiliency, and the innovation of Azure,” says Raval. “These capabilities, along with the features of SAP’s S/4HANA cloud, made working with Microsoft a game-changer.” With the platform’s robust templates and tools, SAP applications can be deployed with confidence, adhering to industry best practices for security and performance, and ultimately reducing total cost of ownership and enhancing ROI. By using RISE with SAP, Accenture strengthened its infrastructure and improved integration of financial data, reporting capabilities, and transaction processing across multiple lines of business and regions—all of which is critical for regulatory compliance and operational resilience. 

“The combination of RISE with SAP and Azure simplified everything,” says Lambert. “It changed our mentality from being an operator of the cloud to being a consumer of the cloud. Instead of spending a lot of time trying to run our systems and our infrastructure, we were able to hand the keys over to SAP with the power of Azure behind it to manage that for us.”

Boosting performance and process times

With Azure and SAP, Accenture has better access to real-time data to make immediate decisions or predictive analysis for future outcomes. Azure services like Power BI, Fabric, and Synapse can easily consume data from SAP systems, which was a plus for Accenture. In fact, Lambert reports that Accenture has been able to process some of its outbound data 70% faster than it had previously.

Raval adds, “RISE with SAP on Azure puts Microsoft and SAP capabilities side by side, offering our clients security and interoperability while also simplifying management of the infrastructure—all with an eye towards AI innovation.” AI-ready offerings are one of many ways Accenture earns business for hundreds of clients across more than 25 industries. In collaboration with Microsoft and using RISE with SAP and Azure as a foundation, Accenture is poised to revolutionize its business with AI, starting with the financial advisor application, an AI-driven tool supporting Accenture’s financial services. 

The application provides advanced advisory capabilities, optimizes financial planning, and enhances predictive analytics for customers. Financial advisor uses SAP AI core and large language models to deliver untapped financial value in financial ledgers and transactions. It’s helping Accenture business and finance leaders reduce decision-making time by 15%, reduce financial narrative efforts by 60%, and mitigate risks with real-time financial data insights, including 13,000-plus user alerts per month. 

“Financial advisor is just one example of what we can do with SAP on Azure,” says Lambert. “We always have our sights on the future—now, with the help of Microsoft, we have even more capabilities to shape what the future looks like.”

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