Funded by the Ministry of Transport, Communication and Information Technology, DataMount Company, and International Emerging Technology Company (ETCO) have signed a cooperation agreement with the Chinese Alibaba Group on cloud computing services.
The signing of the agreement, which was held at COMEX 2021, stipulates that the Data Mount and ETCO will manage, operate and market Alibaba center and services for cloud computing in the region, which will enhance the Sultanate’s position as a regional gateway for cloud computing services and technologies.

The agreement will also stipulate that the three parties provide data processing and cloud hosting services and train national cadres to use Alibaba’s cloud programs.

The aim is to enhance the cloud computing market in the Sultanate and in the region in general.

Under the agreement; Alibaba will invest about $10 million during the first stages of providing central devices and modern technologies, while DataMount will invest nearly $4 million in preparing the infrastructure for the information center; The project is expected to provide the technology sector in the Sultanate with a number of job opportunities (direct and indirect);

Datamount has started training and employing a number of graduates, and it is expected that the number of employees during the first phase will reach 12 employees to work on managing and marketing the project.

Alibaba’s cloud is the leading international provider and the third-largest infrastructure provider in the Asia Pacific region, according to Gartner; Through this partnership, the company aims to provide secure and reliable cloud services and technologies to enterprises in the Sultanate of Oman as a whole and the region in general.

IRVINE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Ingram Micro Cloud, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Consulting Partner and AWS Distributor, today announced a new global Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with AWS. This multi-year, joint investment is geared towards accelerating the growth of AWS Partners worldwide through Ingram Micro Cloud.

During this multi-year, global agreement, Ingram Micro Cloud and AWS will accelerate initiatives to increase reach and footprint in existing geographic markets and expand into new geographic markets across EMEA, LATAM, and ASEAN countries. Ingram Micro Cloud plans to scale AWS adoption with emerging ISVs, while driving greater adoption of AWS solutions with SMB customers through the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace.

Ingram Micro Cloud expects to continue broadening relationships with Emerging and Growth System Integrator (SI) and Value-added Reseller (VAR) partners for AWS through its partner enablement and support initiatives to help AWS Partners build a healthy AWS practice leveraging Ingram Micro Cloud’s 9-step IaaS Practice Building methodology. These initiatives cover a wide range of sales enablement, practice development, technical enablement, and business and financial support services.

“In addition to further strengthening our strategic relationship with AWS, this global agreement underscores the critical imperative of the IaaS business for Ingram Micro Cloud,” said Nimesh Dave, president of Ingram Micro Cloud. “We are thrilled to collaborate with AWS in bringing our skills, services, products, and overall channel knowledge to help our partners find success with AWS at an accelerated pace.”

“We are delighted to deepen our collaboration with Ingram Micro Cloud,” said Doug Yeum, Head of Global Partner Organization at AWS. “Through this agreement and with Ingram Micro Cloud’s expanding AWS Practice and global network of channel partners, more small and medium businesses and ISVs will be able to leverage AWS services to help solve business problems and accelerate growth through digital transformation.”

Additionally, the collaboration will see both organizations work together to bolster Ingram Micro Cloud’s current skills and offerings, as well as develop new resources to support channel partners in managing end customers. Ingram Micro Cloud currently provides an AWS Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) team with over 100+ AWS certifications, AWS Professional and Managed Services, AWS Well-Architected services, Ingram’s Cloud Marketplace with access to automated go to market tools, partner programs like AWS Illuminate, AWS Operations and Billing Services, and more.

“Ingram Micro Cloud has played a key role in building and scaling our AWS business,” said Matt Huff, Principal and President at Redapt. “We don’t normally work with traditional distribution but Ingram Micro Cloud’s ability to align with us strategically and support us with our customers has made cloud distribution an absolutely critical function in the success of our AWS business.”

Ingram Micro Cloud

Ingram Micro Cloud brings together innovators and problems solvers to help the world accomplish more. It facilitates and manages the cloud’s complex digital value chain—all powered by CloudBlue technology. Ingram Micro Cloud operates in 64 countries with over 55,000 reseller partners, and its Cloud Marketplace serves 14 million seats, offering more than 120 cloud solutions. With unmatched global reach, easy access to automated go-to-market and integration tools, deep technical expertise, and a curated selection of scalable SaaS and IaaS solutions, Ingram Micro Cloud helps vendors, resellers and managed service providers by offering More as a Service

T-Systems has expanded its collaboration with Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems to accelerate cloud migrations for T-Systems’ customers.

At AWS re:Invent 2020, the companies announced a multi-year strategic collaboration agreement to enable faster cloud migrations of applications, compute and storing solutions, and security for T-Systems’ cloud solutions. T-Systems broadened its relationship with AWS to better manage the digital transformations of its customers at a faster and more efficent rate.

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated businesses’ digital transformations as they move more workloads and applications, such as Microsoft 365, SAP and Salesforce, to the cloud.

RELATED: Deutsche Telekom takes back some of T-Systems’ operations as part of re-org

Frankfurt, Germany-based T-Systems was founded in 2000 as a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. Last year, Deutsche Telecom took back responsibility for corporate telecom clients as part of a restructuring plan for T-Systems. The revamped T-Systems focuses on IT and digital services.

RELATED: Google Cloud and T-Systems team up on managed services for businesses

T-Systems, which has also worked with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, is also supporting Deutsche Telekom by migrating an increasing amount of its internal IT workloads to the cloud. AWS is one of the preferred cloud providers for those migrations.

T-Systems is also the service provider for several business units within Deutsche Telekom, and has delivered migrations and managed cloud services to those units, including network and security solutions on AWS.

“Since the beginning of our relationship with AWS, we have built up expertise in AWS technology and combined it with our extensive experience from major transformation projects. Our customers appreciate this,” said Adel Al-Saleh, member of the Deutsche Telekom Board of Management and CEO T-Systems, in a statement.

T-Systems’ customers can benefit from its ability to migrate automated applications on a large scale due to its own expertise for developing cloud-native applications. T-Systems has bundled its entire cloud expertise into its Cloud Migration Framework, which includes migrating and managing multi-cloud systems.

T-Systems has roughly 2,200 cloud architects and an additional 1,000 AWS experts. The collaboration agreement supports T-Systems’ plan to build out its capacity in both solutions and people through a training and enablement program. The ICT service provider plans to train 3,000 additional AWS experts as part of the new collaboration.

T-Systems won the AWS Partner Network (APN) Consulting Partner of the year award in the DACH region this year.

Overview

VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) and Pivotal Software, Inc. (NYSE: PVTL) announced on August 22, 2019 that they had entered into a definitive merger agreement under which VMware would acquire Pivotal at a blended price of $11.71 per share. The deal represented an enterprise value of approximately $2.7 billion and was positioned as a strategic move to build the most comprehensive enterprise-grade Kubernetes-based portfolio for modern application development.

Strategic Rationale

The acquisition was framed around three core strategic pillars:

• Accelerating VMware’s “Any Cloud, Any App, Any Device” vision by adding Pivotal’s developer-centric platform and tooling to VMware’s infrastructure portfolio.
• Strengthening Kubernetes leadership: VMware had already acquired Heptio (co-founded by Kubernetes creators) and co-developed VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) with Pivotal in February 2018. Adding Pivotal deepened that position.
• Combining developer experience with IT operations expertise: Pivotal’s developer tools and services, paired with VMware’s infrastructure management capabilities, were intended to give enterprises an end-to-end platform for building, running, and managing cloud-native applications.

What Pivotal Brought to the Table

Pivotal had spent six years at the forefront of modern software development, offering:

• Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF): A leading enterprise platform-as-a-service (PaaS) widely adopted by Global 2000 companies.
• Developer tools and methodology: Agile and lean engineering practices embedded into its services model.
• Spring Framework contributions: Pivotal was a major contributor to the Spring developer framework, which at the time of the announcement was reporting more than 75 million downloads per month.
• Kubernetes-native roadmap: Pivotal had recently launched Pivotal Spring Runtime for Kubernetes and was developing Pivotal Application Service for Kubernetes, signaling a full embrace of container orchestration.

Transaction Details

The deal structure differentiated between Pivotal’s two share classes:

• Class A stockholders (public shareholders) received $15.00 per share in cash.
• Class B stockholder — Dell Technologies received approximately 7.2 million shares of VMware Class B common stock, at an exchange ratio of 0.0550 VMware Class B shares per Pivotal Class B share.

Additional financial details:

• Expected net cash outlay for VMware: approximately $0.8 billion.
• The equity issued to Dell Technologies was projected to increase Dell’s ownership stake in VMware by approximately 0.34 percentage points to 81.09%, based on shares outstanding at announcement.
• VMware held approximately 15% of fully-diluted outstanding shares of Pivotal at the time of the agreement.
• Funding sources: cash on hand, short-term borrowing capacity, and the VMware Class B stock issued to Dell.

The transaction required a majority-of-the-minority vote — approval by holders of at least a majority of Pivotal shares not owned by VMware, Dell Technologies, or their affiliates. Closing was expected in the second half of VMware’s fiscal year 2020, ending January 31, 2020.

Executive Perspectives

“Kubernetes is emerging as the de facto standard for multi-cloud modern apps. We are excited to combine Pivotal’s development platform, tools and services with VMware’s infrastructure capabilities to deliver a comprehensive Kubernetes portfolio to build, run and manage modern applications. Importantly, adding Pivotal to our platform accelerates our broader Any Cloud, Any App, Any Device vision and reinforces our leadership position in modern multi-cloud IT infrastructure.”

— Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware

“The time is ideal to join forces with VMware, an industry leader who shares our commitment to open source community contributions and our focus on adding developer value on top of Kubernetes. VMware has a proven track record of helping organizations run and manage consistent infrastructure in support of mission critical applications, and our two companies have already built a strong foundation on our successful VMware PKS collaboration.”

— Rob Mee, CEO, Pivotal

Context: VMware’s Kubernetes Build-Out

The Pivotal acquisition was not an isolated move. By mid-2019, VMware had been systematically assembling a Kubernetes portfolio:

• February 2018: Co-launched VMware Pivotal Container Service (PKS) with Pivotal and Google, targeting enterprise Kubernetes deployments on vSphere and public clouds.
• Late 2018: Acquired Heptio, the company co-founded by Kubernetes creators Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, bringing deep upstream Kubernetes expertise into VMware engineering.
• August 2019: Announced the Pivotal acquisition, adding a developer platform, Spring ecosystem leadership, and enterprise transformation services.

Taken together, these moves positioned VMware to offer infrastructure, orchestration, and developer experience as an integrated stack — a direct response to cloud-native trends driven by AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.

Advisors

The transaction involved the following advisory teams:

• VMware: J.P. Morgan Securities LLC (financial advisor); Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (legal counsel).
• VMware Special Committee: Lazard (financial advisor); Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP (legal counsel).
• Pivotal: Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP (legal counsel).
• Pivotal Special Committee: Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC (financial advisor); Latham & Watkins, LLP (legal counsel).

Regulatory and Stockholder Disclosures

In connection with the proposed transaction, Pivotal filed a proxy statement and related materials with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Investors were directed to review those materials, available through the SEC’s public filing system at www.sec.gov, before making any voting or investment decisions related to the merger.

Pivotal stockholders were also able to obtain filings through the investor relations section of Pivotal’s website or by contacting Pivotal’s Investor Relations department.

What This Meant for the Industry

The VMware-Pivotal deal was a significant consolidation signal in the enterprise cloud-native space. Pivotal Cloud Foundry had been one of the dominant enterprise PaaS platforms, particularly among large financial services and government organizations. Folding it into VMware’s portfolio raised important questions for existing PCF customers about roadmap continuity, and for the broader market about the competitive dynamics between VMware/Dell, Red Hat/IBM (following IBM’s $34 billion Red Hat acquisition in 2019), and the hyperscale cloud providers.

The deal also underscored Kubernetes’ rapid ascent as the enterprise container orchestration standard, with major vendors racing to build complete stacks on top of it rather than proprietary abstractions.

Forward-Looking Statement Notice

This article summarizes a corporate press release dated August 22, 2019. The original announcement contained forward-looking statements subject to risks and uncertainties, including regulatory approvals, stockholder votes, integration risks, and market conditions. Actual outcomes may have differed materially from those projected at the time of announcement. Readers should consult VMware’s and Pivotal’s SEC filings for complete risk disclosures applicable to the period.