Shell will soon be benefitting from two of the world’s best information technology and service providers, Microsoft and T-Systems, as the two giants will construct a new hybrid cloud solution that will eventually deepen their existing partnership. Dubbed as the ‘Dynamic Services for Collaboration,” it will be a coalescence of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suit (BPOS) and T-System’s Sharepoint technology on single platform, allowing Shell employees to collaborate on the cloud.  It’s another win for hybrid solutions, which still rank as the best of both worlds, segueing the virtualization journey for many businesses seeking the best route.

Undoubtedly, this effort will breed the next generation of online collaboration, at an enterprise level. The new cloud solution will allow teams and personnel to work together on a central system provided with an array of applications for documentation, content management, organization and transmission. It’s convenient considering its usage-based pricing model, and scalability, which makes adaptations to certain requisites possible.

“For us as a globally operating company, SharePoint is a key instrument for smooth cooperation in projects with decentralized teams. This joint solution will allow us to appreciate considerable cost reductions and greater flexibility,” as said by Jay Crotts, Shell’s VP for IT Services, at Microsoft’s Global Energy Forum.

“Microsoft and T-Systems are now bringing together their strengths in SharePoint for Shell. It is highly significant for us that Shell, one of our largest SharePoint customers, is now receiving the application in a hybrid cloud, thus putting them at the top of the innovation tree in this area,” said Jan Piet van Roon, Global Client Director for Shell at Microsoft.

The tandem of Microsoft and T-Systems started back in 2004. With this new undertaking, the two companies are united once more to take hybrid cloud solutions to the next level. Their prior partnership was in 2009 when they worked out the availability of Outlook and Word to networks. T-Systems is not the only company who finds Microsoft SharePoint attractive, but leading enterprise social community software, Telligent, as well. The company has its root from Microsoft, and its founder and CTO Rob Howard, is from Microsoft. SharePoint has become an increasingly popular online business collaboration tool over the past 6 months whose deployment has increased by five times.

The hybrid cloud was named most preferred platform by users, according to a recent Rackspace report. No wonder a lot of companies have been making efforts around it.  During the Partner Exchange 2011, VMware toured us to the hybrid cloud, which the company believes to be the next biggest trend, as well as deployed vCloud Accelerator and vCloud Jumpstart under its vCloud consulting services. Oracle’s also improved its storage management, the Oracle Cloud File System, for the hybrid cloud, while HP introduced a new hybrid cloud service called ‘HP Enterprise Cloud Services Compute’ which vendors can resell and enterprise customers can white label. HP also deployed several other products and services to ensure security, availability and performance of the cloud.