Capgemini announced that Capgemini Financial Services USA has signed an alliance agreement with Surgient, the provider of self-service virtualization and lab management software. The agreement will enable Capgemini to provide even greater value to financial services firms through the use of scalable virtualization across the application lifecycle, which is expected to result in more efficient use of resources and significant cost savings.

"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."

Organizations are adopting virtualization software across the application lifecycle, saving IT an average of three days per environment set up in the test phase, according to "Virtual Lab Automation," a recent study published by vokeStream (2007). Virtual lab automation also helps to enhance communication and relationships, break down silos, predict behavior of the software being developed, reduce defect discovery to fix time, and increase automation effectiveness. On average, firms using virtualization software report a reduction of development and testing costs by as much as 50 percent per project, offering a huge advantage to financial services firms.

"The Surgient Platform provides organizations insight into enterprise-wide inefficiencies, granting their IT departments extra time to uncover defects and improve software quality prior to going live," said Sameer Jagtap, vice president, Business Development and Strategic Alliances at Surgient. "The addition of Surgient's self-service virtualization automation and lab management software will be of tremendous value to global financial services clients as it enables Capgemini to provide superior software development, testing and training support."