Slalom and AWS bring in Launch Centers to help enterprises accelerate business transformation, modernize IT services

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, and Slalom, announced a new multi-year, global, strategic collaboration relationship, to build joint AWS | Slalom Launch Centers (Launch Centers) that will accelerate customers’ migration to the cloud and help them modernize their IT services. 

As part of the relationship, three Launch Centers will initially open in Seattle, Chicago, and Atlanta with plans to open more centers around the world within in the next three years. The Launch Centers will help customers to accelerate their IT modernization and migration strategies to achieve fully optimized, cloud based operating models.

The Launch Centers uniquely combine AWS Professional Services, a global team of AWS experts who help customers reach their desired outcomes with the cloud, with Slalom business transformation, software engineering, and analytics capabilities to address these customer transformations. 

Mutual AWS and Slalom customers can temporarily relocate their IT teams to work from designated Launch Centers, to reap the benefits of working directly with experts in a secure, immersive, collaborative environment that enables a culture of innovation and learning.

The Launch Centers will provide a variety of offerings, including expediting customers’ initial digital launches to the AWS Cloud, and a customized approach to scale their competencies and processes for the future on AWS. 

The AWS and Slalom multi-disciplinary experts can deliver a comprehensive path to the cloud, taking customers through a series of steps, from defining their business strategies and building their cloud migration roadmaps, to optimizing their move to the cloud and implementing a modernized approach for ongoing operational excellence. They will also guide customers through business rationalization and organizational change management, as well as help them to overcome technical readiness concerns, by providing training on how to manage their infrastructure.

Carousel joins RingCentral’s Platinum Partner program; delivers cloud contact center and UC&C engineering capabilities

Carousel Industries announced on Wednesday that it has been named a Platinum Partner by RingCentral Inc.. A designation held by RingCentral’s partners, Carousel’s Platinum Partner status is a testament to the company’s engineering talent, services capabilities, and commitment to customer success.

Carousel customers will benefit deeply from this elevated status. The company will receive operational and technical resources and executive-level RingCentral support only made available through this Platinum Partner status. Combined with Carousel’s Net Promoter Score of 70 and unwavering pursuit of success, customers can now take advantage of an entire portfolio of solutions with the best in high touch services and support. 

Additionally, with a rich history of partnership with Avaya as a Diamond Partner, and now a RingCentral Platinum Partner, Carousel is well positioned to support all possible paths to cloud migration, and is well versed in cultivating migration strategies tailored to the individual and changing needs of the customer.

“Serving as a RingCentral Platinum Partner is evidence of Carousel’s rigorous customer success standards and technical expertise,” said Rick Houlihan, VP of Cloud Services, Carousel. “It is our honor to continue being a RingCentral preferred partner and bring cloud UC&C and contact center technology to our more than 6,000 enterprise customers who benefit from our services each and every day.”

“We’ve consistently looked at Carousel as a strong leader in delivering cloud technology solutions thanks in part to its engineering expertise and ability to exceed customer needs,” said Zane Long, SVP of Global Channel Sales, RingCentral. “On behalf of all of us at RingCentral, I am ecstatic to continue partnering with Carousel to help enterprises benefit from the power of the cloud to deliver true impact to their businesses.”

“Due to the newly formed strategic partnership between RingCentral and Avaya, Carousel is in a truly unique position to serve businesses,” continued Houlihan. “As Avaya’s U.S. Partner of the Year and now as a Platinum Partner in RingCentral’s Program, Carousel can help businesses navigate and gain incredible value from two of the leading cloud communications solutions providers in the world.”

SoftwareONE acquires BNW to accelerate SAP capabilities on public cloud hyperscalers

SoftwareONE announced on Tuesday that it has acquired BNW Consulting, a provider of SAP platform transformation, public cloud migration and application management services. In line with SoftwareONE’s strategy, this acquisition will strengthen and extend the group’s SAP Technology Services capabilities focused on public cloud migrations, S/4 HANA transformation and support.

Founded in 1996 and based in Melbourne, BNW is a growing technology and cloud consulting company that deals in services around SAP platform transformation and migration from on-premises to public cloud hyperscale platforms, such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, and Ali Cloud. 

In addition, BNW offers organizations its proprietary SAP-certified tool, PowerConnect, that provides analytical insights into SAP performance data across on-premise and cloud infrastructures, as well as security and business process data. BNW currently supports organizations in Australia, APAC, Europe and the United States, and will be available globally with the SoftwareONE global portfolio and footprint.

Warwick Chai, founder and Managing Director of BNW, and Stefan Baumann, co-owner and Chief Operating Officer, will join Daniel Da Vinci, SoftwareONE’s SAP Global Practice Director, in leadership roles. 

Consistent with SoftwareONE’s “Vision 2022”, the BNW acquisition will strengthen and extend SoftwareONE’s Technology Services capabilities and advance its global SAP Technology Practice as one area of strategic importance for customers and expected growth for SoftwareONE.

“We welcome BNW’s 30+ SAP technology specialists, who will significantly enhance SoftwareONE’s global SAP & Technology Services capability, in our group,” said Dieter Schlosser, CEO SoftwareONE. “Our new colleagues will service their customers in APAC and the US, and beyond, in close conjunction with the established Manila SAP Center of Excellence”.

Earlier this year, SoftwareONE announced that it had acquired SAMSentry, a software governance technology. The technology will be incorporated into SoftwareONE’s managed services portfolio, to work in conjunction with Software Asset Management (SAM) technologies such as Flexera, Snow and ServiceNow. 

To drive additional value across the software estate and existing technology investments; while visualizing findings and tracking on-going improvements.

SAMSentry utilizes insights derived from machine learning across millions of data points to manage and measure organizations against industry best practice, based on over 10,000 consultancy hours. 

Through its dashboard, SAMSentry helps organizations understand what action needs to be taken to improve efficiency and high-risk internal processes. With a focus on the latest security, data protection and cloud management standards, SAMSentry uses blockchain technology on Microsoft Azure cloud.

Snowflake partners with Next Pathway to automate migrations from legacy data warehouses to Snowflake

Snowflake and Next Pathway announced a strategic partnership to accelerate the migration from legacy data warehouses to Snowflake. This move has led Snowflake to incorporate SHIFT into their technology offerings under the banner, ‘SnowPATH Powered by Next Pathway’, effective immediately.

Snowflake will license Next Pathway’s proprietary code translation technology, SHIFTTM, to provide Snowflake customers the ability to automate what is typically the most time-consuming, manual and costly task in a cloud migration effort – legacy code conversion. 

This includes the automatic conversion of database objects such as SQL, Stored Procedures, workflow and orchestration logic (ETL), DDL, and other code types, from technologies such as Teradata and Netezza.

Traditionally, the path to decommission legacy data warehouses involved lengthy manual development and testing efforts to rewrite and refactor code that has been built over decades – a process that takes months or years to complete. 

Through the use of SHIFTTM, customers can automatically convert the most important (or the most complicated) workloads in hours, reducing migration costs.