Capgemini Partners With Amazon

Capgemini is trying to position itself as the professional services company that businesses can turn to when developing their cloud computing strategies. On Tuesday, the company announced that it's partnering with
Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN).com to help businesses plug into Amazon's cloud.

The company also launched a new group, the Cloud Computing Center of Excellence, that will help businesses evaluate and implement cloud services and offer cloud consulting, application development, migration, and backup services and readiness assessments, beginning with services for Amazon's cloud platform. The center will also train "hundreds" of Capgemini employees on how to provide cloud computing services.

Initially, the new group will focus primarily on three cloud scenarios for which Capgemini has done several pilot tests, including hosting
Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) SharePoint or
Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL) ERP and doing custom application development and testing on Amazon's cloud platform.

Capgemini has hosted several pilot projects running Oracle applications on Amazon EC2 and S3, including a transportation management application, Oracle database, and Fusion middleware. Capgemini found that Oracle apps were easier to deploy, more scalable, and cheaper to operate in the cloud than on premises, and the client using the transportation management application is moving from pilot to production, based largely on the promise of Amazon's almost infinite scalability.

Capgemini also has a few SharePoint pilots under way, including one with a "major automotive manufacturer" that now wants to move some of its previously server-based SharePoint users onto the cloud for collaboration and document and knowledge management.