Editorial & Analysis

Atos joins forces with EMC and VMware to create new cloud company

16 Feb 2012

New European venture Canopy pledges to combine technology and professional services in a 'one-stop cloud shop', as Jessica Twentyman reports.

French IT services company Atos has announced plans to create a new European cloud company, Canopy, in a joint venture with information management company EMC and virtualisation specialist VMware.

The three companies will invest “tens of millions of euros” on Canopy, according to Atos CEO Thierry Breton, and the agreement between the three companies should be finalised early in 2Q12. The new company will be headquartered in Europe and managed by Atos.

“Canopy will bring under one roof all the elements needed to address the cloud in an open environment,” said Mr Breton, on a conference call with analysts and journalists. Atos customers, he said, have been requesting a ‘one stop shop’ for cloud computing beyond the consulting and migration services that the company currently offers.

Canopy’s services fall into four categories. First, it will offer consulting services, helping clients to map out their ‘cloud journey’.

Second, the company plans to open an ‘enterprise application store’, inspired by the online app stores that consumers use to download software onto their iPhones and Android smartphones. Here, companies will be able to shop for hosted applications, offered on a software-as-a-service basis, in areas such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise content management (ECM) and product lifecycle management (PLM). While the range of apps is yet to be finalised, the first industries that Canopy will target include healthcare, manufacturing, automotive, financial services and the public sector. The enterprise app store is scheduled to open in April 2012.

The third element of Canopy will be a cloud development and testing platform, offered on a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) basis. Here, customers can prepare legacy applications for migration to the cloud or build and test new apps. It’s also where ISVs [independent software vendors] can create applications that they will subsequently offer via the Canopy enterprise app store. The platform is expected to be available some time before the end of June 2012.

The final part of the Canopy portfolio is private cloud solutions. Atos will work with technologies from EMC and VMware to create pre-configured cloud stacks that can be deployed in a customer’s own data centre or an Atos data centre. These services should be available in the second half of 2012, according to Breton.

It’s an interesting vision – and a catchy name for a cloud company. The partnership has done a good job of identifying those issues and concerns that keep customers “teetering on the edge”, in Breton’s words, when it comes to cloud adoption. These, he says, include the weight of legacy assets, the fear of migration challenges, the complexity of the cloud market, data localisation issues, security and availability concerns and a widespread eagerness to avoid ‘vendor lock-in’.

“I believe it’s our responsibility as a major IT services company to unlock this situation and provide the proper answers, so that our clients can benefit from all the advantages of cloud computing,” he said. His presentation highlighted Canopy’s credentials as a ‘one stop shop’; its commitment to enterprise-class specifications; its focus on vertical-industry expertise; and its commitment to open standards.

For Gartner analyst Eric Knipp, the announcement of Canopy would seem to represent a step in the right direction for the cloud industry. “Combining cloud platforms with professional services is a key step in the maturation of the cloud services market,” he writes in his blog. “While I don’t know enough about Canopy to know if the company will succeed, I am excited to see more examples of organisations whose stated business strategy aligns so well with what Gartner has been saying for several years.”

He expects to see more announcements like this in the near future as companies such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Oracle make professional services "a key ingredient in the cloud services recipe."