NEW YORK-July 15, 2015

Accenture(NYSE: ACN) has signed a five-year contract with Freeport-McMoRan Inc., a premier international natural resources company, to continue migrating its information technology (IT) operations to a cloud-based model. Aligned to its cloud strategy, the project is designed to help Freeport-McMoRan achieve its “IT of the Future” objective — which includes making the company more agile and enabling it to innovate faster — while reducing costs and improving service quality and satisfaction.

Freeport-McMoRan’s new IT system will be based on the Accenture Hybrid Cloud Solution for Microsoft Azure, a powerful cloud solution designed to bring new capabilities, economics and innovation to large enterprises. Accenture, Avanade and Microsoft worked together to create a solution that incorporates hybrid technologies and services to help build and manage enterprise-wide cloud infrastructure and applications. This cloud solution is enabling Freeport-McMoRan to migrate and manage applications between private and public cloud environments in a controlled, seamless and automated way.

“This program brings innovation and cloud economics to bear as we work to become more agile, drive increased revenue, and continue our focus on items that impact mine production,” said Bertrand (Bert) Odinet, VP and CIO, Freeport-McMoRan. “By partnering with Accenture, we will gain the ability to grow our service portfolio and scale our IT services in line with our global business requirements.”

Among the benefits and capabilities that Freeport-McMoRan can expect to achieve as a result of the migration are an increase in operational efficiency, decrease in costs due to centralizing the management of workers, automation of routine tasks, and enablement of shared services. The transition to the Azure-based platform should also help the company minimize future costly data center migration activity, because workloads can be proactively moved to their most cost-effective platforms.

“We are collaborating with Freeport-McMoRan to help them evolve to an everything ‘as-a-service’ model, giving them the ability to easily provision new capabilities, reduce risk associated with vendor ‘lock-in’ and enable them to scale their IT services up and down as needed,” said Amy K. Dale, managing director and client account lead, Accenture. “With the Accenture Hybrid Cloud Solution for Microsoft Azure at its core, Freeport-McMoRan’s new hybrid IT cloud model should deliver unprecedented levels of agility with enterprise-grade ruggedness.”