Partnerships

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Capgemini, provider of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, announced today that Capgemini Financial Services USA has signed an alliance agreement with Surgient.

“By partnering with Surgient, we can now offer clients access to environment configurations through a centrally managed, shared service, eliminating manual provisioning work and delivering much higher utilization of expensive pre-production infrastructure. The results expected are shorter response times, reduced costs and ultimately, better business support,” said Charlie Li, vice president of the Quality Management and Testing Practice at Capgemini’s Financial Services Strategic Business Unit. “Delivering quality applications is closely tied to performance and reputation — and with this innovative virtualization solution, we can help global firms become more agile and better focus on their frontier application strategy in meeting their diverse and growing business needs.”

Meanwhile, VMblog points to a month old article on Austin Business Journal about Surgient, speculating about a future IPO or acquisition.

Surgient apparently hit its stride this year after tweaking its sales approach last summer, allowing companies to buy licenses for its virtual lab management software. President and CEO Tim Lucas says the growing popularity of virtualization gave Surgient the boost and a chance to double its revenue this year.

Lucas expects revenue to exceed $20 million for 2008.  And the company has recently signed 20 large customer deals, including German tech companies SAP AG and Siemans AG.  “We’re profitable now and cash flow is funding the growth of the business,” he says.

A report by The 451 Group cites HP and Borland Software as possible buyers of the Austin company. Lucas agrees that acquisition is a possibility but says an initial public offering could be considered as well.