IBM spinoff Kyndryl has signed a global agreement with AWS, but Microsoft Azure is still the major focus for ANZ, according to the company’s local boss.
Speaking to CRN prior to today's announcement, Kyndryl ANZ managing director Kerry Purcell said that Microsoft is the biggest focus for him personally and the company.
“I have a very strong Azure-first strategy for our business here in Australia and New Zealand and we are really working hard to look at our skills, our hiring and our training centred around cloud enablement,” he said in an interview Friday.
“We've obviously been doing work with SAP and Oracle, running mission-critical systems for our customers on those applications for some time."
He added that now the focus was on how to accelerate and help customers shift workloads to public cloud.
“For us, that's really around the Microsoft Azure platform,” he said.
The new global deal with AWS will see the two companies invest in building a global AWS practice with the integrator establishing an AWS Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE). Kyndryl said in a statement that this will help its staff “optimise their customers’ migration journeys with AWS, tapping into the availability, reliability, and security of the world’s leading cloud”.
Kyndryl is already a Premier Global Alliance Partner and MSP-certified member of the AWS Partner Network (APN).
The company’s global boss Martin Schroeter said, “Our ability to freely explore and unleash the combined benefits of AWS cloud services with Kyndryl’s deep industry-specific managed services and expertise will provide an unprecedented level of knowledge and innovation.
“Together, we will invest in enhancing Kyndryl’s expertise in AWS to help companies modernise, innovate, and compete.”
Purcell told CRN last week that there were a number of opportunities the company was looking at this year, including its building on its recent attainment of certified strategic service provider status with the Government’s Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) under the agency’s new hosting certification framework, announced in January.
“Leveraging a shared services asset class, such as the mainframe sitting in the secure location so we're partnering with CDC, there's clearly an opportunity,” he said.
“In those same data centres, we have primarily Microsoft Azure, obviously Dell, and a number of other key partners. So we've got a truly hybrid cloud environment that we can now operate in. We can leverage the Z cloud solution and we can build a truly multi cloud, managed service environment, partnering with CDC and working closely with Microsoft, working closely with IBM and Dell and VMware and SAP, Pure Storage and these players to optimise and meet customers where they are.”
“That's both an opportunity but, more importantly, it's addressing a key business challenge that all the federal agencies have—and the same would apply to state governments as well.
He added that across the other major industries, there are a large number of mission critical applications that still run on premise and many customers are 20 to 40 percent of the way through the journey to the cloud.
“So we're well-positioned if we continue to invest, particularly in cloud, in the migration of applications to the hyperscalers, then also security and network.”
Kyndryl said in a statement today that it invested heavily in developing AWS competencies and has built “an experienced team of AWS-certified services professionals” through its training academy.
The two companies will further invest in the education of more than 10,000 Kyndryl professionals by the end of 2022, the company said.
.jpg&h=298&w=480&c=1&s=1)
