VMware Cloud Platform Enables Capgemini to Improve SLAs, Reduce Costs for ERP Hosting

The Capgemini Group is one of the world’s foremost providers of consulting, technology, and outsourcing services. With more than 120,000 consultants and employees in 40 countries, Capgemini creates and delivers technology solutions to fit clients’ needs and drive the results they want. The company reported 2011 global revenues of EUR 9.7 billion (approximately USD $12.8 billion). Capgemini has a longstanding reputation for its capability in SAP implementations and is SAP certified. It manages its customers’ SAP environments with its unique set of capabilities to deliver virtualization and cloud services as one of its core competencies. Capgemini is known for its ability to provide cost-efficient and reliable managed services, particularly in the realm of ERP hosting. The company has evolved its approach over the years, moving from traditional server platforms to virtualization and cloud-based solutions, which has allowed it to consolidate datacenter facilities and achieve cost savings that benefit its customers.

When businesses approach Capgemini about managed services for their SAP implementations, they’re seeking two things. They want the kind of cost efficiencies made possible by cloud-based service offerings. They also want service levels that are not typically offered by public cloud providers. As Anthony Palacios, Principal and Cloud Services Business Leader, Capgemini, explains, “Our customers want to take advantage of economies of scale, but they also want an offering wrapped around strict SLAs. They’re transferring the risk of running their challenging ERP systems to a third-party provider. They need to have comfort on things like response times and batch job completions.” Capgemini has a longstanding reputation for its capability in SAP implementations. Capgemini is SAP certified and manages its customers’ SAP environments with its unique set of capabilities to deliver virtualization and cloud services as one of its core competencies. And while at one time it ran these implementations on traditional server platforms, its thinking has since evolved. The company realized that virtualization would allow it to consolidate its datacenter facilities, which would in turn allow it to achieve cost savings that it could pass along to its customers. In recent years, as virtualization technology matured, Capgemini became confident that the technology was stable and robust enough to support significant business applications. In 2010, the company decided to launch a cloud infrastructure tailored to SAP deployments, and began the process of selecting a virtualization platform.

To select its virtualization platform, Capgemini evaluated a range of options, including both open source and proprietary hypervisors. The criteria it used as the basis for its evaluation included a number of non-technical considerations. Pricing was one factor: Capgemini needed a platform that would deliver the expected cost savings. Another driver was whether SAP was certifying the technology in question. Capgemini also considered its alliances with virtualization technology providers. Equally important, the company needed a reliable virtualization solution that it could trust technically, so it also performed an in-depth technical analysis, running virtualization hypervisors to test both Windows and UNIX environments on hardware from all major manufacturers, from HP to IBM to Fujitsu. “We ran our analyses for about a year, looking at all major combinations of hardware and hypervisors,” says Palacios. VMware vSphere came out as the leading choice on every single feature. “The VMware product line is the most mature virtualization technology out there,” notes Jacques Telles, Senior Manager, Capgemini. “We found it to be the leading choice for customers running either Windows or the various Linux operating system flavors.” VMware supports ERP application, operating system, and database vendors without the limitations that Capgemini found in other hypervisors. Because the industry sees VMware as the virtualization standard, Capgemini knew that its customers would feel comfortable with a cloud offering based on VMware vSphere technology. Capgemini also had previous experience with VMware; it has VMware certified technicians on its staff, which means that deploying a cloud architecture on VMware would require less of a learning curve. The company is also confident in the VMware support organization, another factor crucial to business-critical deployments. Based on the findings of its analysis, Capgemini proceeded with using VMware to build its cloud architecture. For ha

• Capgemini’s new VMware cloud services environment has proved an easy sell for its SAP customers.
• The combination of a highly regarded service integrator and a leading technology provider is a clear benefit to clients that wish to accelerate the business benefits of virtualization.
• Capgemini’s clients trust them with their business-critical ERP applications; indeed, their reputation is built upon this.
• The Capgemini cloud service solution offers other benefits as well, including scalability, rapid provisioning, and easier implementation and execution of disaster recovery services.
• The benefits of Capgemini’s cloud-based ERP architecture have triggered growing demand for its managed services offering.

• Moving SAP environments onto Capgemini’s cloud pays for itself in as little as three years.
• The cost of service with 99.8% availability on the cloud is the same as that with 99.5% availability on traditional hosting platforms.