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Look who's SAP happy: HDS eyes up French techies at Oxya for lunch

La surprise! Une acquisition est sur les cartes, mon ami

Hitachi Data Systems intends to acquire Oxya, a SAP technical services and hosting outfit.

Oxya, founded in 1998, is an international business headquartered in Paris, France, and has operations in Belgium, China, the UK and the US.

It offers technical SAP services, hosting and outsourcing, and has had a relationship with HDS for some while – such as using HDS' UCP (Unified Compute Platform) system with SAP software.

In October 2013 HDS talked about a new consumption model for SAP in EMEA, mentioning:

oXya, a hosting provider for SAP applications has deployed customer instances of SAP software on Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Pro for VMware vSphere. oXya expertly manages the intricacies of 24/7 mission-critical operations in SAP software environments for over 230 hosted enterprise customers and 190,000 users.

That's risen past 200,000 users now. HDS has also published an Oxya success story [PDF] revolving around UCP kit – converged storage, server, networking and software management – with SAP HANA.

HDS veep for business operations in its global services unit Phil Townsend explained to The Register the background to the acquisition, saying Hitachi is ramping up stuff for what it calls social innovation – which is nothing to do with Twitter or blogging or Facebook.

Instead social innovation is supposed to be improving society's infrastructure: water treatment plants, trains and other public transit, healthcare, IT and telecommunications, energy production, smart grids to distribute power, elevators and escalators, construction machinery, automotive technology, and so on.

Yes, the Internet of Things

Naturally, all this machinery, much made by Hitachi, will be peppered with more and more sensors pumping out data to be acquired, stored, integrated with other information, filtered, put into subsets and analyzed as big data. The Pentaho acquisition is relevant here.

Businesses need to keep their systems running smoothly with all these extra bytes flying around, which is where SAP software – and its in-memory HANA database – comes into play. Townsend said HDS' global services will be strengthened by the intended acquisition of Oxya:

  • A stronger ability to configure, run and support SAP and SAP HANA
  • An expanded ability to run and host SAP and HANA environments where necessary
  • And be better able to support its global system integrators with SAP and SAP HANA activities

Customers, Townsend said, are moving increasingly to a consumption model of IT – such as HANA-as-a-service – and Oxya will help HDS meet that need.

The acquisition is intended to close by April this year, subject to the usual conditions. The price is not being revealed.

When the biz gobble completes, if it does, Oxya will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Data Systems. It will continue to execute its business model under Oxya chairman Frederic de Belloy, reporting to Hicham Abdessamad, HDS EVP for Global Services.

+Comment

El Reg thinks HDS is gradually becoming a horse of a different colour. If Hitachi really can produce an Internet of Things synergy between its civic and private infrastructure plant and machinery, and link that big data and its analysis to core business processing of structured data – think Hadoop meets HANA – then it should be able to talk to its customers at a very much broader level than a mere IT supplier.

This could be like General Electric or Siemens with its own integrated IT supplying operation alongside, inside. No other IT supplier has this potential.

We tip our hat to Channel News France, which first reported that HDS wants to snap up Oxya. ®

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