VAR500: Insight Buys Ensynch; Accenture Books Thomas Cook Deal

VAR500 Solution Providers In The News

Solution provider Insight Enterprises this week bought Ensynch -- one of Microsoft's top solution providers. The deal will enhance Insight's capabilities in several areas, including cloud computing.

In other VAR500 news, Capgemini and EMC partnered on a cloud solution, Accenture won a lengthy contract from a travel services giant, SIS made a deal with CloudOne, CSC aimed its SaaS offering at insurance companies, WIpro partnered with a 4G LTE provider, and a Fiserv white paper looked at banking and mobility.

Insight To Acquire Top Microsoft Provider

Insight Enterprises will buy Ensynch, a technology services firm that is a leading provider of Microsof solutions. Financial terms of the deal were not released. The $4.8 billion IT solution provider is expected to close the deal with Ensynch, which had 2010 services revenue of $16.2 million, within 30 days. The agreement brings to Insight Ensynch’s capabilities in cloud, identity management and virtualization. Gene Holmquist, the chief executive of Tempe, Ariz.-based Ensynch, will join Insight as vice president of software sales while chief operating officer Stan Lequin will become vice president of national professional services.

Capgemini, EMC Partner On Cloud Solution

Capgemini is joining forces with EMC to identify and build multiple cloud-based IT-as-a-Service offerings, which should help customers reduce costs and gain efficiency and business agility. The first offering will be, ’Storage-as-a-Service,’ a solution designed to help deliver more agile and efficient storage solutions to customers. ’Storage-as-a-Service’ 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. In the future, the pair will roll out other solutions, including ’Messaging-as-a-Service,’ during the next 12-18 months.

SIS To Provide Hosting For CloudOne

Solution provider SIS will deliver a flexible and economical platform for CloudOne’s IBM Rational development tool. CloudOne is the first IBM Business Partner to provide IBM Rational software development tools in the cloud through on-demand Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) licensing. SIS will provide hosting and additional infrastructure services for CloudOne customers from its new Managed Solutions Center in Lexington, Ky.

Accenture Signs 10-Year Deal With Thomas Cook

Travel services company Thomas Cook Group awarded Accenture a 10-year technology consulting and outsourcing contract. The agreement will include the transformation and management of the Thomas Cook’s technology infrastructure across Europe. The financial terms of the contract were not disclosed.

As part of the deal, Accenture will design and implement an agile IT infrastructure that integrates Thomas Cook’s separate European IT structures into one group organization. The infrastructure will use public and private cloud technologies to help transform IT operations, processes, methods and systems. Accenture will provide technology infrastructure management, IT service delivery, service management, service desk, data center services, workspace services, network services and security services, as well as finance and accounting BPO services to Thomas Cook as part of the contract.

Fiserv: Banks Ideally Positioned To Offer Mobility

A new white paper from Fiserv discusses why banks and credit unions are ideally suited to support mobile payments and provides information on ways they can enter the market. The paper, entitled ’Beyond Mobile Banking: It’s Time to Stake the Claim for Mobile Payments,’ offers five reasons why financial institutions are uniquely positioned to offer mobile payments: consumer trust; access to consumer accounts; payments knowledge; necessary assets and existing relationshios. A chart showing the companies consumers trust to handle mobile payments can be viewed here.

CSC's SaaS Offering Helps Insurers Cut Costs

Computer Sciences Corp. has debuted a new software-as-a-service platform for its Exceed Billing application. The product is aimed at speeding up the billing process for insurance carriers in order to lower their operational and implementation costs. According to CSC, the SaaS version of Exceed Billing will help carriers of all sizes to deploy the service securely and implement the application throughout their systems. Exceed Billing now includes self-service capabilities that customize payment options either through new pay plans or by closing and replacing plans without involving a software engineer.

Wipro Inks Deal With 4G LTE Provider

LightSquared has chosen Wipro to be its technology partner for systems integration and managed services, as the wireless networking company builds and deploys its wholesale-only platform for its nationwide network. The wholesale platform will let LightSquared’s partners provide critical customer management services to their end-users.

LightSquared, in co-operation with Wipro, selected three key components for its platform:


-- Provisioning and activation, provided by Evolving


-- Real-time usage and credit management, provided by Openet


-- Rating and billing, provided by Convergys