The Capgemini Group (Capgemini) announced plans to launch a series of environments around the globe to usher in the next era of service-orientation and end business as usual. The environments, called Rain, for "RApid INnovation," were developed in collaboration with Intel and will show transformation in action. The first physical Rain environment opened today in Cupertino, Calif., and another one in Europe will open soon. The physical environments are complemented by a virtual environment that allows organizations to model business processes with plug-and-play applications and a modular infrastructure. The Rain environments will bring organizations along a journey that envisions the future, unleashes the business from IT constraints and ultimately helps transform the business model.

Ever since the introduction of Web services as the next evolution of scalable software architecture, leading technology vendors and their systems integration partners have been seeking to position themselves as innovators around service-orientation. However, many technology vendors and systems integrators have focused their efforts solely around the software or service-oriented architecture layer.

Capgemini and Intel take a different approach to service-orientation. The two groups believe organizations must apply service-orientation to more than software. SOEs modernize software and hardware, streamline business processes and use technology to define the future competitive landscape. This focus on software, hardware, processes and business value helps organizations make a fundamental shift from the "business as usual" of the past to a future built on innovative service-oriented business processes supported by a modular, manageable IT infrastructure. At the end of a Rain experience, organizations will have a clear roadmap to becoming a service-oriented enterprise. Through the combination of Capgemini consulting expertise and Intel's next-generation computing platforms, companies seeking to make many of their core business processes "plug and play," will have the ability to turn raw data into real time intelligence, and at the same time, prioritize seamless integration between suppliers, customers and employees.

"Together, the service-oriented enterprise concept and Rain act as the gateway to the emerging intelligent economy," said Joe Thomas, global head of new business development for Capgemini. "Rain will deliver industry-specific roadmaps that come alive through the research, development and testing power of our ecosystem partners who will populate the Cupertino hub and the future Rain environments around the globe. These roadmaps provide Rain customers with real-world business solutions to make tomorrow's problems today's opportunities."

"The Service-Oriented Enterprise is about much more than architecture or infrastructure; it is a fundamentally different business model," said Chris S. Thomas, chief strategist for Intel. "SOE is about how a company uses IT better to support market-driven business processes. New Intel platforms provide the ideal foundation for SOE through delivering enhanced manageability, hardware-based virtualization features and energy-efficient performance."

Rain will have a sector orientation that initially focuses on three industries where the need for service orientation is most acute: utilities, retail and manufacturing. Global clients will be invited to an "Insights Day" at the Cupertino hub on Oct. 26 to discover first hand the methodology that Capgemini and Intel have outlined to bring the service-oriented enterprise to life.

Capgemini and Intel are the founding partners of Rain, and they are joined by ecosystem partners. The Rain environment is vendor-agnostic and welcomes the participation of infrastructure and application partners.