What is a 70-year-old business to do when it finally realizes it needs to move to cloud in order to modernize? Does it corral its information technology team and put it through cloud training and certification courses? Not if it’s the Educational Testing Service Inc., a nonprofit educational measurement organization. Instead, it just gets Accenture LLP to handle the hassles involved in moving to cloud.

Accenture’s proposition to companies looking to leverage cloud for innovation is pretty simple. “If you’re a surgeon — do surgery,” said Michael Liebow (pictured, right), global managing director at Accenture.

Liebow and Chris Milkosky (pictured, left), enterprise architect at ETS, spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Executive Summit in Las Vegas. They discussed the ETS and Accenture partnership. (* Disclosure below.)

Old school org gets startup makeover

Organizations like ETS want to leverage cloud to get better at what they do and to innovate new products and services. The more plumbing they can outsource to a managed service provider, the better off they’ll be, Liebow pointed out.

In conjunction with the College Board, ETS administers the SAT to college hopefuls every year. It teamed up with Accenture in 2017 when it realized it needed to move to cloud. Its goal is to leverage cloud technologies to improve test assessment and research.

The partnership has created the ETS cloud platform. It allows ETS to focus on innovating, while Accenture’s cloud-management service handles pricing, capacity. tooling, policies, security, cost, etc.

ETS wants to start acting like a startup, according to Milkosky. It is trying out new things with data analytics, artificial intelligence, and mobile features.

“You feel it. Everybody’s coming up with new ideas, and we’re trying out new things. And with the help of Accenture, we’re going to be able to do that a lot faster and in volume,” Milkosky stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Executive Summit event. Neither Accenture LLP, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE