Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has expanded its partnership with The Co-operative Group Limited (Co-op), one of the world’s largest consumer co-operatives with interests across food, funerals, insurance and legal services, to adopt a cloud first strategy that will support the group’s business growth. TCS has been the strategic partner to Co-op for the past 14… Read more »
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Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SoftwareOne Holding AG, a global provider of end-to-end software and cloud technology solutions, have partnered to help customers transition to RISE with SAP on an AWS cloud environment. Called the Ready for RISE on AWS bundle, it combines SoftwareOne’s deep SAP advisory and implementation knowledge with AWS technologies to expedite… Read more »
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HCLSoftware, a provider of enterprise software solutions, has signed a Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS that will allow customers to consume the HCLSoftware portfolio as cloud native SaaS in AWS Marketplace simplifying their procurement and deployment process. With Cloud-native architectures leveraging Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, HCLSoftware portfolio can seamlessly integrate into customers’ existing cloud environments,… Read more »
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The John Lewis Partnership, the UK’s largest employee-owned company, has formed a strategic partnership with Google Cloud, worth £100m over the next five years. The move represents a major expansion of the successful relationship it has had with Google since 2012. This collaboration marks a significant step forward in the John Lewis Partnership’s digital transformation… Read more »
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VMware has joined forces with AMD, Samsung, and members of the RISC-V Keystone community to simplify the development and operations of confidential computing applications. These industry and community leaders will work together to ease the transition to practical confidential computing by collaborating on and contributing to the open source Certifier Framework for Confidential Computing project. … Read more »
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Oracle has announced a new partnership with BT as the company continues its efforts to redefine its offering and penetrate the cloud computing market segment, reports Telecoms.com.
Through the new partnership customers will be able to use several features of BT Cloud Connect environment to gain direct connectivity to the Oracle Cloud. The offering will provide options for connectivity from hybrid enterprise data centres to the Oracle Cloud, of which there are currently 19 spread around the world.
“Direct and reliable access to data and applications hosted in cloud environments has become critical to organisations as they embark on their digital transformation journeys,” Luis Alvarez, CEO of Global Services at BT. “We are accelerating our drive to be the world’s leading cloud services integrator and I am proud that BT is becoming the first global network services provider to offer direct access to the Oracle Cloud.”
Both companies have launched new initiatives to capitalize on the burgeoning cloud computing industry. BT’s Cloud of Clouds offering was launched last year in April as part of the company’s new technology roadmap to move customers onto a cloud platform. The Cloud of Clouds offering allows customers to integrate BT’s private, public and hybrid cloud services, as well as services from partners including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce and Cisco.
Oracle’s journey to the cloud has been a more varied experience, though the team would appear to be prioritizing the market segment for future growth. The tech giant was seemingly very sceptical over the implementation of cloud initially, as Oracle Executive Chairman Larry Ellison said in an analyst briefing in 2008, “The computer industry is the only industry which is more fashion driven than women’s fashion. I was reading W and it said that orange is the new pink. Cloud is the new SaaS.”
Since this comment the company has changed its direction, acquiring several cloud vendors to boost its position in the market. Oracle has however taken a slightly different approach from others in the industry, targeting organizations which have a vertical specific cloud offering. Opower, a company which provides customer engagement and energy efficiency cloud services to the utilities industry, was acquired for $532 million in May, and Textura, a provider of construction contracts and payment management cloud services, was bought for $663 million in April.
Although Oracle has been late to the party, the company has committed heavily to the new market. During the quarterly call earlier this month Ellison claimed Oracle is in a strong position to grow in the IaaS, having invested heavily second generation data centres. Telecoms.com readers would appear to agree with Ellison’s confidence as we asked in a flash poll whether the company could break AWS, Microsoft and Google’s dominance in the IaaS market; 64% agreed it could in time.
Oracle has committed heavily to the cloud computing market in recent years after an initial period of denial, which could be linked back to the company’s reliance on revenue driven from non-cloud products. The partnership would appear to be a move to justify the company’s position in the cloud market as Oracle lean on BT’s credibility to push its cloud offering to BT customers.
Capgemini and Siemens’ Building Technologies division have announced a new partnership to develop analytics-based services for the smart buildings space.
The new team will focus on developing the Siemens Navigator platform to produce an enhanced IoT management platform featuring asset management and analytics technology. The objective of the technology will be to increase energy efficiencies of the buildings, as well as the lifecycle potential of their customers’ real estate assets.
Siemens claims customers using their platform currently save 10.5 million tons of CO2 per year, though by incorporating Capgemini’s IoT, data analytics, and cloud capabilities, the ambition is to extend and drive this digital transformation project, in a phased approach.
The smart building industry has been gathering momentum in the last few months, though hasn’t been grabbing the same headlines as autonomous cars or the overarching smart cities projects. One estimate puts market value as high as $36 billion in 2020, highlighting that buildings can consume anywhere between 20-40% of the total energy intake of a country, creating a lucrative market for potential IoT vendors. While energy efficiency is one of the more obvious drivers for smart buildings initiatives, safety and security factors have also enhanced the growth of this market.
“The Internet of Things is a massive accelerator for digital transformation,” said Capgemini’s Olivier Sevillia. “Building a consistent strategy and providing an innovative platform for IoT services is an asset that companies can leverage for the benefit of their clients.
“This cloud based data driven services project will make the widespread benefits of connected buildings a reality for Siemens Building Technologies’ real estate customers, helping them to make more informed business decisions and realise operating efficiencies. Capgemini will support this roll-out from strategy development through to implementation and integration.”
SAP CEO Bill McDermott (Left) and Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft (Right) speaking at SAPPhire Now in Orlando
Microsoft and SAP have extended a long-standing partnership to deliver broad support for the SAP HANA platform on Microsoft Azure.
The extended partnership will focus on greater integration between the two portfolios to simplify work-through integrations between Microsoft Office 365 and cloud solutions from SAP. The new team also claim the combined proposition will provide enhanced management and security for custom SAP Fiori apps.
The announcement builds on a previous relationship which was debuted in 2014, allowing SAP customers to build HANA applications in the Microsoft cloud platform, taking advantage of public cloud scalable resources, though the new partnership now incorporates more of the Azure security and management capabilities.
“This partnership is perhaps one of the broadest things we’ve done together,” said Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft. “Take the cloud. We’ve taken the best of SAP and the best of our hyper-scale cloud. It means SAP certifications are now certified on Azure, HANA is certified on Azure and S/4 HANA is certified on Azure.
We’ve taken our hyper-scale cloud and made it real for customers. Every application which SAP run is now compatible with Office 635 meaning we now have seamless integration. This recipe is going to accelerate the growth which our customers seek, by combining two product portfolios which are customers probably already use.”
As part of the new agreement, there will be a new deployment option for SAP HANA on the Azure cloud. The updates will certify SAP HANA to run development, test and production workloads on Microsoft Azure, including SAP S/4HANA, and will enable customers to run larger and more demanding workloads than previously possible. New integrations will also enable customers to combine Office 365 features (including communications, collaboration, calendar etc.) with SAP cloud-based applications including Concur, SAP Fieldglass and SAP SuccessFactors.
New developments which can be expected towards the latter end of the year also include the ability to deploy custom mobile hybrid SAP Fiori apps on SAP HANA Cloud Platform with an open standards plug-in framework, which will enable Microsoft Intune capabilities to be embedded within the app itself. The team believe these integrations will be available in Q3.
“We believe the IT industry will be shaped by breakthrough partnerships that unlock new productivity for customers beyond the boundaries of traditional platforms and applications,” said SAP CEO Bill McDermott. “SAP and Microsoft are working together to create an end-user experience built on unprecedented insight, convenience and agility. The certification of Microsoft Azure infrastructure services for SAP HANA along with the new integration between Microsoft Office 365 and cloud solutions from SAP are emblematic of this major paradigm shift for the enterprise.
The news follows another partnership announcement from SAP with Apple made in recent weeks. Apple has made multiple moves over the last 24 months to improve its position in the enterprise IT space, partnering with Cisco last year, to optimise iOS device performance across Cisco’s suite of enterprise communications services, and IBM in 2014, bringing IBM’s strengths in big data and analytics to Apple devices.
EY and EMC have announced a formal strategic partnership over business technology services, building on a long-standing relationship between the two firms.
The partnership will offer a number of different services to clients ranging from enterprise mobility management, hybrid cloud enablement, governance risk & compliance and cyber security.
“Working together as an integrated team, combining advisory services and innovative products, we will be able to connect on both existing and future initiatives to help our clients maximize their technology investments and drive better business outcomes,” said Mark Weinberger, Chairman and CEO at EY. “The alliance will further expand EY’s digital capabilities and range of services offered to clients.”
Addressing growing trends in the industry, security will form one of the central pillars of the partnership. One of the first offerings from the team is Isolated Recovery, an offering which protects company data from cyber-attacks. The team claim a combination of cyber, business impact analysis and resiliency services, will provide a more secure environment for company data.
The partnership will also include Identity Access Management Monitoring (IAM) for single sign on, which will utilize real-time monitoring technologies. Security monitoring is not something that enterprise organizations traditionally engage in, though it is a growing trend as organizations aim to reduce risk when moving through to a cloud environment.
The alliance builds on EMC’s trend of partnering with major technology players to deliver alternative solutions. Last month, EMC and VMware jointly launched a family of hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIA) for VMware environments.
The VxRail appliance family combines EMC’s data services and systems management with VMware’s software such as vSphere and Virtual SAN.
Lenovo and Juniper Networks have announced a global strategic partnership to drive development of next-generation datacentre infrastructure solutions.
The partnership will focus on next-generation converged, hyper-converged, and hyper-scale data centre infrastructure solutions for enterprise and web-scale customers. The aim of the union will be to deliver flexible and cheaper solutions for customers, with a strong focus on simplifying user experience.
“Partnering with Lenovo expands Juniper’s strategy to deliver a full-stack solution for a wide-range of data centres, from the mid-range enterprise to private cloud and to hyper-scale customers,” said Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim. “We are excited about collaborating with Lenovo to leverage the full power of our IP-networking portfolio based on JunosOS and Contrail, in delivering the next generation of converged, hyper-converged, and hyper-scale solution to customers in China and globally”
As part of the partnership, customers will be able to purchase Juniper networking products directly through Lenovo, as well as receiving a consolidated support function for both companies. With the move to disaggregation of hardware and software in the datacentre, the two companies intend to bring open, flexible solutions to market, leveraging the ONIE (Open Network Install Environment) model.
“Lenovo is on a mission to become the market leader in datacentre solutions. We will continue to invest in the development and delivery of disruptive IT solutions to shape next-generation data centres,” said Gerry Smith, Executive VP and COO at Lenovo’s PC and Enterprise Business Group “Our partnership with Juniper Networks provides Lenovo access to an industry leading portfolio of products that include Software Defined Networking solutions – essential for state-of-the-art data centre offerings”
With a focus on the Chinese market, currently plans centre on a joint go-to-market strategy, as well as a tailor-made resell model to address unique localization requirements in China.