Freeport-McMoRan has given itself five years to complete the cloud migration

Copper and gold producer Freeport-McMoRan is embarking on a five-year project aimed at migrating its core IT applications over to a hybrid cloud platform. The company said the move is aimed at helping it become more agile and reduce overall IT spending.

Freeport-McMoRan is migrating to a system developed by Accenture and based on Microsoft Azure; the company said its core applications will be deployed on a combination of private and public cloud platforms, with Avanade and Accenture offering up a series of tools helping the company automate and manage its workloads.

“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 Odinet, vice president and chief information officer of 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,” Odinet said.

Amy K. Dale, managing director and client account lead, Accenture said: “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.”

Freeport-McMoRan is the latest natural resource firm to move its core applications into the cloud. In April this year Rio Tinto announced a partnership with Accenture that will see it move the bulk of its application landscape to Accenture’s public cloud service in a bid to save costs and switch to an “as-a-service” IT model.