A canapé of Cloud services from new industry alliance

Atos, EMC and VMWare have launched a new joint venture called Canopy, which will provide a "one stop shop" for buyers of Cloud services – according to the suppliers. The tagline for Canopy is "The open Cloud company" – emphasising that the suppliers are promising that you will be able to avoid lock-in. Atos is in a lead role and has already invested "a few tens of millions of Euros".

During a call to analysts, EMC's CEO, Joe Tucci (who has recently delayed his retirement to spend at least another year with the EMC) was keen to highlight the company's very circumspect approach to partnering. "The key is to not over-partner and think carefully about the importance of the geography or the vertical. Our approach is to have a good plan and to go deep…. the only thing that makes partnerships successful is crisp execution."

Between them, the triumvirate of industry stalwarts will jointly provide the following:

1. Consulting and management services
2. Enterprise Application Store
3. Cloud-based, Solution Development and Test Platform (PaaS)
4. Private Cloud solution

These are targeted at "large and upper midsized" organisations in the commercial and public sectors.

The announcement last week was the initial PR push around the new JV, but there are still bits of the puzzle that need to be put into place. For example, Canopy does not actually have its own CEO yet; he/she will be appointed soon by Atos (in agreement of the other partners). The companies are still finalising the business plan for Canopy, with expected completion over the next 2-3 months. The app store is expected to go live in April, with apps for sale covering enterprise email, Big Data Analytics, Public Sector solutions, ERP, CRM, Enterprise content management and others. Down the line, Canopy expects to start building an open ecosystem with ISVs who can sell their own apps through the store.

While some things are still clearly evolving both behind the scenes operationally and 'front of house' in terms of what you can buy, what is absolutely in place is a group of around 100 consultants and strategists. "It's critical and mandatory to have the right team on day one," says Atos CEO, Thierry Breton.

Canopy's owners claim that they have founded the JV because "most customers" are requesting a one-stop-shop. That might mean you being able to buy more 'under one roof', but it is not going to enable you to avoid undertaking all the usual investigative work you'll need to do around SLAs, proof of concept, migrating workloads and so on when moving services to the Cloud. What you do get is the peace of mind that it is an organisation underpinned by big tech brands, rather than yet another completely new Cloud brand for you to learn about from scratch. Furthermore, we know that many of you currently prefer to work with existing suppliers for your new Cloud services - particularly in view of the fact that you will be looking to run these alongside legacy systems. If you're an existing Atos, VMWare or EMC customer, I think it is particularly worth you investigating what benefits Canopy might be able to bring you. Though bear in mind that in the very short term, the focus will be on trying to get you signed up to the consulting services.