Indian Financial Firm Enters BPO Market

A company that bills itself as the largest non-bank financial institution in India has launched a BPO unit.

Radware Revamps Go-To-Market Strategy

Double Duty For Accenture

Accenture late last month landed a pair of outsourcing contracts with NewPage Corp., which manufactures coated paper.

Under an IT outsourcing pact, Accenture will manage NewPage’s enterprise IT functions, including infrastructure operations and maintenance.

In that capacity, Accenture is teaming with (i)Structure, a data center outsourcing firm, based in Broomfield, Colo. Accenture has a strategic alliance with (i)Structure.

Accenture’s other outsourcing deal with NewPage covers payroll, benefits administration, health and welfare administration, contact center management and associated IT services.

NewPage began operating as an independent company on May 2, following the acquisition of MeadWestvaco Corp.’s printing and writing papers business.

IBM Bolsters Grid Partner Roster

IBM on Tuesday disclosed a handful of alliances intended to boost its grid computing offering.

The grid alliance activity involves Absoft Corp., SAS Institute Inc., and Univa Corp. Grid computing, part of IBM’s virtualization strategy, seeks to harness disparate computing resources to focus on specific problems.

Absoft announced that its High Performance Computing Software Development Kit has been designed to run on IBM’s Grid and Grow cluster hardware.

IBM in August launched its Grid and Grow initiative, which aims to provide a packaged set of software, hardware and services that let customers deploy grids.

IBM, meanwhile, cited SAS as the latest software vendor to join the Grid and Grow offering.

SAS will participate in IBM’s Ready for Grid computing program, which validates that an application can operate in a grid environment.

The lack of applications optimized for grid computing has been a barrier to broader customer deployment, according to market watchers.

Finally, IBM and Univa agreed to provide what the companies termed an “enterprise-ready” release of the open-source Globus Toolkit on IBM platforms.

Univa will deliver a commercially supported release of Globus for use on IBM eServer products running AIX and Linux.

ComPiere, BakBone Schedule Partner Sessions

ComPiere Inc., a provider of open-source business applications, scheduled intensive and advanced training sessions for the company’s ERP/CRM solution for Nov. 7-11 and Nov. 14-16, respectively.

The sessions will take place in ComPiere’s offices in the Portland Business Accelerator building, Portland, Ore.

In addition, BakBone Software, a maker of data protection software, has set its first partner summit for Jan. 17-19, 2006 in San Diego.