Atos Origin, an international IT services company, received a prestigious innovation award ‘EMEA North Partner Award 2008 for most innovative use of virtual infrastructure’ at the 2009 VMworld event in Cannes. This award was given to Atos Origin in recognition of its innovative use of VMWare technology across its customer base in Europe.

The Award was won based on following criteria:

* Achieving a high speed of implementation – VMWare virtualization technology is used in customer projects and outsourcing and can increase IT agility while reducing capital, operating and energy costs by up to 30 percent through effective implementation of virtualization technology. Through re-use of best practices, proven work methods and clever tooling, customer benefits can be achieved in a very short timeframe.
* Virtualization technology embedded in the Atos Origin organization – Atos Origin built a utility based infrastructure in its data centres and created a new virtualization practice with Adaptive Virtualization Services to deliver more sustainable IT services and to help customers benefit from this innovative technology either as part of an existing outsourcing contract or for non-outsourcing clients, a services led assisted transformation engagement.
* Foundation for cloud computing – The implementation of VMWare technology provides a base enabling foundation for delivery of a federation of internal and external cloud services. Atos Origin is working closely with VMWare to deliver on the vCloud initiative announced by VMWare.
* Customer base – VMWare technology is used in numerous international customer projects for server consolidation, virtual client infrastructures and infrastructure cost reduction programs. Customers include: Draka, Esko Artwork, NHSScotland, Unigarant.

Atos Origin and VMware forged a global partnership late last year in order to address the growing demand for virtualization technology. The relationship enables Atos Origin to deliver end-to-end virtualization services to customers. As a result, customers worldwide have access to a broad portfolio of industry-leading virtualization solutions. More recently Atos Origin and VMWare extended this relationship into the VMWare vCloud initiative.

René Baas, Senior Vice President, Global Managed Operations at Atos Origin said: “As the market for virtualization solutions continues to grow, Atos Origin invests considerable resources and efforts to this offering as it is one of our strategic enabling technologies. Winning the European innovation award from VMWare underlines our proactive innovative approach in this market with services to provide best in class virtualization technologies that will provide lower costs, better performance, more flexibility and more Green IT to our clients. Winning this award also underlines the strength of our global partnership as established in 2008 between Atos Origin and VMware.”

The main criteria for granting Atos Origin the award were the fact that it leverages the VMware platform to help save its customers money and provide them with more flexible, scalable and reliable IT infrastructures. Furthermore VMware stated that Atos Origin sets an example of how to implement virtualization fast and effectively across an international customer base. Both companies agree on continuing their collaboration to provide innovative IT solutions for customers.

Virtualization plays an important role in adaptive IT to enable efficient changes in business processes. Atos Origin utility based datacenter infrastructure and its virtualization services is based on a best practices technology and management framework. By stacking several standardized building blocks e.g. storage and security, Atos Origin provides four commoditized services to the market: server virtualization, desktop virtualization, application virtualization and disaster recovery virtualization. Atos Origin provides a unique solution to the customer by customizing or adapting these commoditized services to the specific requirements of the customer.