The deal unites Capgemini’s corporate sales and service channel with Amazon’s established cloud infrastructure. The companies hope this will offer customers a ready-to-implement product. The partnership will extend Capgemini’s portfolio of outsourcing services.
It is hoped the service will enable Capgemini’s clients to reduce costs, increase flexibility and efficiency and improve their green IT credentials. The company also hopes that provisioning and deployment time will also be improved with the service.
The two companies will run a Cloud Computer Centre of Excellence. This will feature Amazon Web Services trained and educated personnel based in North America, Europe and India and aims to help its clients to understand and implement Amazon Web Services. The Centre will offer cloud consulting development, migration and back-up services.
Richard Payling, VP of global outsourcing at Capgemini, told CBR that the seeds were sown for the partnership in May 2008 after the two companies met a number of times to discuss where cloud computing was going. Payling says that Capgemini was very impressed with Amazon’s cloud computing structure.
Once Capgemini had made the decision to launch a cloud computing offering, a number of other companies were considered before they settled on Amazon Web Services as a partner. “We looked at IBM, HP, Google Apps, and we may still work with them in the future, but we felt Amazon Web Services was the most suitable for our business. They have the most mature offering and the most open offering, it’s almost like we’re getting the bare metal with which to work,” Payling said.
Three pilot schemes were run with clients — an Oracle Applications pilot, a Microsoft SharePoint pilot and an application development trial. Payling says that all trials performed well and as expected. The Oracle Applications pilot reduced deployment time by 70%, from 10 days down to three. Both the Oracle and the application development pilots found significant cost savings.
Payling said that one of the key reasons behind Capgemini’s decision was the increased exposure cloud computing has had recently and its increasing adoption by enterprises. “The media coverage of cloud computing was a factor. We believe cloud computing will become business as usual for most enterprises,” he said.
A recent survey of small and medium businesses sponsored by Microsoft found that 41% of decision-makers did not understand how using hosted applications would help their company. Payling says this is not a concern for Capgemini. “There has been plenty of hype surrounding cloud computing, but we know it’s real and we can demonstrate the benefits to our customers. Beyond the hype, the enterprise is ready,” he said.
Payling hopes that a partnership between two well-established names – Amazon Web Services was launched in 2002 – will help persuade any sceptical clients that cloud computing is the way forward.
