Capgemini and EMC Form Strategic Alliance

Capgemini
and EMC
Corporation announced a strategic alliance to jointly identify and
build multiple cloud-based IT-as-a-Service offerings, enabling customers
to reduce costs and gain efficiency.

As one of
Capgemini’s global strategic partners, EMC will help Capgemini expand its cloud-based business service portfolio.
The first offering to be rolled out will be ‘Storage-as-a-Service’.

According
to Forrester Research Inc., the global market for cloud computing will grow
from $40.7 billion in 2011 to more than $241 billion in 2020, and the market
for private cloud solutions will grow from $7.8 billion in 2011 to $15.9
billion. Forrester’s models reveal a significant cost difference, with the
cloud-based model coming in 74% less expensive than Infrastructure &
Operations running it in-house. Forrester attributes this higher cost to
several factors, including staff, facilities and power, and data migration.

The Storage-as-a-Service offer delivers a cost-effective way to consume storage
that removes the complexity of
capacity planning by providing storage tiering to meet varied customer demands
and increase business agility. Capgemini and EMC have developed a common and
repeatable storage architecture that delivers predictable costs and service
levels and shifts storage costs from capital expenditure to operational
expenditure. In addition, ‘Messaging-as-a-Service’ and other offerings will be
rolled out over the next 12-18 months.

The
Capgemini IT-as-a-Service delivers a feasibility analysis for
the implementation of a self-service and consumption-based charging model.

This
service tackles all issues around the development and delivery of 
consumed business services, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) strategy,
the identification of key business services and service strategy for public and
private clouds.

Today,
messaging requires significant resources in order to remain vigilant about
security and optimize storage. Capgemini’s Messaging as a Service (MaaS) is a feature-rich
utility based and secure email messaging service that can handle these
complexities so organizations can focus on its business priorities.

Bill
Teuber, EMC’s Vice Chairman, commented: "EMC and Capgemini share the same vision for providing customers with
the cloud-based services that enable them to enjoy the benefits of cloud
computing, including increased efficiency and business agility. Capgemini’s
global scope will enable customers around the world to more easily accelerate
and adopt cloud computing to meet their business objectives."

Patrick
Nicolet, CEO of Infrastructure Services at Capgemini said: "We are delighted to be making this important
strategic announcement and feel that EMC is an ideal partner for us to meet the
growing demand for cloud and As-a-Service solutions. Leveraging EMC’s
world-class offerings in data and cloud computing, starting with
‘Storage-as-a-Service’, we are certain that this agreement will help us to
offer improved, differentiated and competitive solutions to customers
worldwide."

Under
the terms of a five-year agreement, both companies will jointly work to
identify and build tailored solutions based on Capgemini’s global service
capabilities and EMC’s cloud optimized information management
technologies. The solutions will be designed to meet customers’ business
challenges, requirements and service level agreements for specific vertical
market segments and geographies including North America, the UK, Netherlands,
the Nordics, France, Germany, China and Brazil. These services will provide
flexible, agile business solutions in line with evolving client needs. They
also will enable customers to gain savings in annual IT
spend by lowering the total cost of ownership, shifting from Capex to
Opex-based models, and implementing a common platform and tools which will
support process standardization and management efficiencies. This collaborative
initiative will leverage common channels through Capgemini and EMC to bring to
market a portfolio of end-to-end cloud-based ‘as-a-service’ offerings that
initially include the new ‘Storage–as-a-Service’.

Capgemini’s
relationship with EMC dates back to 2002 when the companies began offering
joint pay-as-you-go storage services. In 2010 EMC acknowledged Capgemini as
EMC’s Partner of the Year with the Information Infrastructure Group, for the
second year in a row.