Genpact, Ariba Expand Alliance to Deliver Procure-to-Pay Solution

Image representing Ariba as depicted in CrunchBase

Genpact Limited and Ariba, Inc. today announced that they have expanded their alliance beyond invoice solutions to encompass the full suite of Ariba’s cloud-based collaborative business commerce solutions into Genpact’s source-to-pay offering. Genpact will combine Ariba’s solutions with its comprehensive service offerings to create a new turnkey offering that will enable medium to large enterprises to improve their visibility into the procurement process and drive greater cost savings. The news came during Ariba LIVE Barcelona, the business commerce event of the year.

This collaboration brings to market a powerful services and technology offering that allows enterprises to fully realize the potential of the source-to-pay cycle. Utilizing Genpact’s unique Smart Enterprise Process (SEPSM) methodology, in conjunction with the Ariba’s cloud-based collaborative commerce applications, will give companies access to industry-leading technologies, standardized practices and strong global relationships. Genpact will leverage its global delivery network to support strategic, transactional and operational source-to-pay processes for companies in multiple industries including life sciences, banking and financial services, consumer product goods (CPG), and manufacturing.

The joint solution will provide clients with access to all aspects of the Ariba Collaborative Commerce Platform including:

  • Cloud-based applications for spend analytics, eProcurement, eSourcing,
    supplier performance management, contract management, working capital
    management and eInvoicing;
  • A community of partners through which they can quickly discover,
    qualify, connect, and collaborate with trading partners; and
  • Capabilities in the form of best practices, community-derived
    intelligence and other unique features or services that are only
    available to members of the community, such as unique analytics,
    preferred financing, and ratings.

“Genpact is excited to expand our alliance with Ariba, as this significantly enhanced offering combines the full range of Ariba’s collaborative commerce solutions with Genpact’s procurement services led by our SEP framework for making business processes much more effective,” said Shantanu Ghosh, senior vice president, Practices, Solutions and Transitions, Genpact. “Our offering not only rapidly reduces the total sourcing and procurement costs, but enables companies to have a high level of visibility and control of their sourcing and procurement process. The combination of these smart processes and smart technologies will result in substantially better business outcomes.”

“Social networks have revolutionized our personal lives, and the technologies underlying them are now helping to transform business,” said Jon Stevens, senior vice president of Global Channels and Alliances, Ariba. “As partners like Genpact recognize, the Ariba Network is an ideal platform through which companies can discover, connect and collaborate with their trading partners and drive process improvements that positively impact their performance and bottom line.”

Genpact employs its unique SEPSM methodology to implement best-in-class practices across sourcing and procurement organizations for both direct and indirect materials. SEPSM is driven by Lean and Six Sigma-based reengineering, analytics, domain expertise, and smart technology execution and delivers 2-5 times higher impact on key business outcomes like reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO), working capital optimization, and availability of material and services. SEPSM provides clear linkages between performance measures, drivers and business outcomes, as well as a clear roadmap for improvements.

Ariba combines industry-leading cloud-based applications with the world’s largest web-based trading community to help companies discover and collaborate with a global network of partners. Using the Ariba® Network, businesses of all sizes can connect to their trading partners anywhere, at any time from any application or device to buy, sell and manage their cash more efficiently and effectively than ever before. Companies around the world use the Ariba Network to simplify inter-enterprise commerce and enhance the results that they deliver.


Online Tech Offers Data Security Scholarship to College Students

Online Tech is awarding two $1,000 scholarships to students interested in pursuing a career in information technology, computer sciences and healthcare information technology. The 2012 Data Security Scholarship will be available for the Fall semester of the 2012-2013 academic year.

Applicants should show an interest in cloud computing, data computing, disaster recovery, colocation and similar topics as it relates to the ever-changing fields of information technology and healthcare IT.

“Online Tech feels strongly about offering the scholarship in order to encourage tomorrow’s technology leaders to pursue higher education in their respective fields,” said April Sage, Online Tech’s Director of Healthcare Vertical and Marketing.

Scholarships awarded by Online Tech will be based on the applicant’s response to one of the following questions:

1. Healthcare: “What do you see as the best technology for improving healthcare and health IT?”

2. Mobile Security: “What do you see as the most serious mobile security threat facing consumers and/or companies and why?”

While the traditional essay submission is one option, Online Tech has also opened up the submissions to take the form of a short, 10-minute video or an infographic complete with a brief explanation.

All interested students can apply on Online Tech’s website by clicking here. Submissions should submitted no later than July 8, 2012. Winners for the award will be announced by August 10, 2012.


Cloud Computing: 10gen Scores $42 Million in Big Data Funding

10gen, which wrote the open source NoSQL MongoDB database, has pulled in $42 million in financing to add to the $31.4 million it’s gotten since it started.
It’s unclear what round this is since it got a $20 million D round last September, but Business Insider heard it was valued at $500 million–$550 million this time through.
The new money is coming mostly from new investor New Enterprise Associates with existing investors Sequoia Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners and Union Square Ventures kicking in.
The company says it means to use the money to develop MongoDB and the MongoDB Monitoring Service (MMS) and support its user base and community better. “We want to change the database market, to make MongoDB the best way for companies to build new applications,” said CEO Dwight Merriman, the founder of DoubleClick, in a statement. “Our goal is to give tech teams not only a database that scales to any Big Data level required but also helps developers be productive and more nimble.”

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PubNub to Exhibit at Cloud Expo 2012 New York

SYS-CON Events announced today that PubNub, a provider of real-time data push services for web and mobile apps, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
PubNub is a blazingly fast cloud-hosted data push service for building real-time web and mobile apps. Hundreds of apps and thousands of developers rely on PubNub for delivering “human-perceptive” real-time experiences that scale to millions of users worldwide. PubNub delivers the infrastructure needed to build amazing MMO games, social apps, business collaborative solutions, and more.

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Cloud Computing: GoGrid Private Cloud Now Available in Amsterdam

GoGrid on Tuesday announced the availability of its Private Cloud service in the company’s newest data center in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. “We’re excited to bring our Private Cloud to Amsterdam,” stated John Keagy, CEO, GoGrid. “The new solutions make it easy for companies to create the secure environments their business requires, including full isolation of end-user infrastructure to ensure regulatory or industry compliance.”
To satisfy demand, GoGrid has created three new Private Cloud offerings to help customers worldwide take advantage of scalable compute power, virtual server images, load-balanced infrastructure, private networking, and elastic storage in a completely dedicated and secure environment—without hardware procurement or resource sharing.

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Are Conference Calls the New Coffeehouses of Idea Enlightenment?

Edison is believed to have said “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”, and 9 out of 10 times “implementation trumps innovation” when it comes to achieving commercial success, but is it just me, or has the well of new ideas around cloud computing run a bit dry recently?
Big Data is rapid gaining ground on cloud computing when it comes to search popularity on gartner.com. And SDN (Software Defined Networking) may be flavor of the month in cloud blogs, but although there is a succinct impact on cloud computing, this is really more a networking idea. Now off course, cloud computing is only one force – and mainly an enabling one – in the nexus of cloud, information, social and mobile, but when monitoring the various publicly available industry news feeds, I get a bit of a groundhog day (the movie) feeling. You might even say we have taken a step back in some cases, with enterprises implementing older concepts – such as managed hosting – under the moniker of cloud, as my colleague David Mitchel Smith described in a recent post on reverse cloudwashing.

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Cloud Integration – Foundation for Successful Cloud SaaS Deployments

Effective integration of Cloud software services to existing in-house applications is an important element of leveraging the Cloud. It is not sufficient to be content with procuring software as a service and deploying the product. A solid integration strategy and plan can support the connections and seamless transfer of data across on-premise and external services. Cloud integration has to take into account factors such as elasticity and scalability and the architecture has to be clearly defined to support these integration aspects. If integration is not done right, silos can develop and data redundancy can quickly creep in. The key is to build an integration framework or layer that supports Cloud services and on premise applications, services, databases in the organization.

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Capacity Planning for the Cloud

When it comes to issues of capacity planning, many IT groups find themselves playing a guessing game. You can look at what you have today and try to extrapolate where you’ll be in six months or a year, but the fact is you just don’t have all of the necessary data. You can’t predict what various business units will decide to do next, and how that will impact your resources.
Cloud computing solutions have mitigated the problem to some degree. They offer the kinds of flexibility and scalability your organization needs. Yet, you still need to be able to know how much you’re going to use in terms of cloud resources. You still need to do capacity management and planning.

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Cloud computing to lift off in China

It has been reported that cloud computing is quickly emerging as one of China’s fastest growing industries. The annual rate of growth has been calculated at 40%.

The nation currently accounts for less than 3% of the global cloud computing market share as it was valued at $90 billion in 2011, however with such a rapid growth this is sure to increase.

It has been estimated that China’s cloud computing market is estimated to grow from about 16.7 billion CNY (£1.67 billion) in 2010 to 117.4 billion CNY (£11.7 billion) in 2013, with a compound annual rate of growth of 91.5%.

This represents a staggeringly fast rate of growth in just a few years. Furthermore, by 2015, the Internet Society of China predicts that the Chinese cloud computing market will be worth 1 trillion CNY.

The majority of this growth is to be …

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