Microsoft India announces strategic alliance with TCS for virtualisation centre

Microsoft India and Tata Consultancy Services today announced a strategic alliance between the two companies to launch Microsoft-TCS virtualisation Center of Excellence (CoE) in Chennai.

The CoE is a joint initiative by the companies to accelerate the adoption of virtualisation technology in India.

Designed to help customers experience the right approach to applying and managing virtualisation across IT architectural layers - server, machine, application and desktop - in their business environments, the centre will leverage Microsoft technologies such as Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, to showcase virtualisation scenarios to customers.

"Virtualisation is one of the most disruptive technologies in the world today. Though there is adequate knowledge on the benefits of virtualisation -- only 5 per cent of the world's servers are virtualised today. There is a clear gap between awareness and adoption of this technology, which has emerged from the lack of guidance among customers around actual implementation of this technology and their inability to demystify the conceptual transition from physical to virtual environments," said Rajan Anandan, managing director, Microsoft India.

"Due to its key benefits such as improved performance, reduced total cost of ownership and increased availability of IT infrastructure, virtualisation is increasingly being viewed as an imperative technology by customers, specifically in these challenging economic times," said P R Krishnan, vice president and global head, IT Infrastructure Services, TCS.

The Microsoft-TCS virtualisation CoE will deliver a heightened user experience that will help customers demystify virtualisation: migration from physical to virtual environments, user experience and performance, management of physical and virtual infrastructure from a single console -- and experience how virtualisation technology deployment in the datacenter can enable improved performance, higher availability and lower cost of ownership of IT infrastructure.