VAR500: Cognizant Earnings Report, Atos Origin Vows To Ban E-Mail

VAR500 Roundup

VAR500 solution providers, including CDW, Accenture, Logicalis, Cognizant, and Atos Origin, all made waves this week. From one solution provider seeing revenue jump more than 40 percent, to another's vow to ban email within three years, North America's largest solution providers were certainly not frozen by the latest U.S. cold snap.

Cognizant's Earnings Way Up

Cognizant announced its fourth quarter and full year 2010 financial results on Tuesday. The solution provider attributed its annual revenue growth of 40 percent — to $4.59 billion — to stronger discretionary spending demand than initially anticipated. Cognizant had a fiscally strong fourth quarter, with revenue growth of 7.7 percent sequentially and 45 percent annually. The company provided guidance for 2011 revenue growth of at least 26 percent.

"Clients increasingly turn to us as they look to outsource a broader range of services and simultaneously address the secular and technological shifts impacting their industries," said Francisco D'Souza, president and CEO of Cognizant in a statement.

Logicalis Earns Cisco Recognition

Logicalis has been awarded the Cisco Powered Private Cloud designation and the Cisco Master Managed Services Certification. These designations recognize Logicalis’ investment in the ITIL processes, practices and tools necessary to provide high-quality cloud and managed services. Logicalis is one of the first Cisco partners in the United States to have achieved this goal.

CDW Behind the High-Tech At Cowboys Stadium

Before people began gearing up for the Super Bowl at Cowboys Stadium, CDW worked for 18 months to create a technology solution that would help to change the fan experience at each event. The team needed a data center – housed inside the stadium – to support the 30-plus organizations affiliated with the franchise in more than 90 locations, including the stadium itself and 35 pro shops selling team merchandise. It would also need to support team operations. The resulting solution included HP blade servers with a storage area network core and tailored tape backup technology. In early 2009, CDW configured the products and shipped the equipment to the new stadium.

Among the enhancements: The stadium has 932 wireless access points. Ticket-takers are equipped with wireless handheld devices to scan tickets, while staffers at bars and clubs have wireless handheld terminals to speed both order taking and customer payment. Through virtualization, the stadium's data center uses significantly fewer servers, which reduces power consumption and the space consumed by the data center.

Atos Origin: No More E-Mail

Atos Origin this week declared it's aiming to be a zero-email company within three years. Speaking at the fourth in a series of innovation press conferences, Atos Origin CEO and Chairman, Thierry Breton, said his goal to eradicate all emails between Atos Origin employees would be achieved by using improved communication applications as well as new collaboration and social media tools.

"The volume of emails we send and receive is unsustainable for business. Managers spend between 5 and 20 hours a week reading and writing emails," said Breton.

Atos Origin is encouraging the use of tools such as Office Communicator and has set up social community platforms to share and keep track of ideas on subjects from innovation and Lean Management through to sales. Initial feedback is that those types of tools reduce email by between 10 and 20 percent immediately.

Accenture Teams With LAN Cargo to Streamline Logistics

LAN CARGO, the cargo subsidiary of LAN Airlines, has deployed a new cargo reservation management system with Accenture, providing its cargo booking software designed for freight and logistics and acting as system integrator.

The cargo reservation system gives LAN CARGO the ability to run real-time operational checks that will reduce re-routing of shipments as more thorough capacity and restriction checks are done before accepting orders. LAN CARGO’s expected benefits from this new cargo reservation management system include better visibility of network availability, ability to offer multiple options to its customers, IT cost savings, and increased operational efficiencies.