Rio Tinto announced a partnership with Accenture that will see the global mining firm move the bulk of its application landscape to Accenture’s public cloud service.

Rather than add new systems into the mix the deal will see Accenture help the British-Australian firm consolidate its ERP and IM platforms and put them on Accenture’s cloud infrastructure. As part of the move Accenture will manage the lifecycle of the applications, which will be hosted in Accenture’s datacentres.

Rio Tinto Group said it moved its application landscape in a bid to save costs and switch to an “as-a-service” IT model that allows it to pay only for the resources it uses.

“Rio Tinto is on an ambitious journey to a world-class IS&T delivery model that is innovative, adaptable and cost-effective, fully supporting our business priorities and group operating model,” said Rio Tinto Group chief information officer Simon Benney.

“We selected Accenture to help us manage this transformation based on its global delivery capabilities, its vision for the intelligent business cloud and its ability to support our digital transformation programme,” Benney said.

Pierre Nanterme, chairman and chief executive of Accenture said: “This solution will allow Rio Tinto to smartly connect its infrastructure, software applications, data and operations capabilities in order to become an agile, intelligent, digital business that can better navigate the commodities cycles.”