Bull strengthens storage professional services capability with Europe-wide NetApp ASP/APSP accreditation

Bull's StoreWay storage integration organisation rolls-out first phase of European NetApp professional services capability.

Paris, January  28, 2010 -

Bull is building on its worldwide STAR distribution agreements signed with NetApp in 2005 to address the growing market demand for high-level architecture and implementation services.

Through an extensive certification program launched in 2008 and covering over 200 Bull sales and services personnel throughout EMEA, a first wave of countries have obtained NetApp Authorised Support Partner (ASP) and Authorised Professional Services Provider (APSP) status, enabling them to deliver a wide range of accredited support and implementation services across the entire range of NetApp products.

This training programme is the largest undertaken by any NetApp EMEA partner to date, and gives Bull the widest coverage of support and implementation services of any NetApp partner in the EMEA market.

To date, Austria, France, The Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK have achieved ASP status, with Austria, France, Spain and the UK having attained APSP status. A second group of countries are working towards ASP/APSP accreditation over the coming months.

Bertrand Ratouis, director of business development in Bull's Infrastructure Support and Services division notes "The storage services sector is increasingly being driven by vendor certification that guarantees customers the right skills profile and level of expertise of their professional services engineers providers. The Bull NetApp certification programme is a key component of a wider certification programme that we are running covering all aspects of the IT infrastructure and including storage-related areas such as virtualization and storage assessment services."

"We are very pleased to see the growing acceptance of our ASP and APSP offering and to enhance our long-standing partnership with Bull", said Juan de Zulueta, Vice President Alliances & Channels EMEA at NetApp. "I am convinced that our joint customers will benefit from Bull's investment in our service portfolio delivering a variety of best practices, best-of-breed support and in-depth know-how. Our objective is to help customers go further; faster and profound services play a crucial role to achieve it."

About Bull

Bull is a leader in secure mission-critical digital systems. The Group is dedicated to developing and implementing solutions where computing power and security serve to optimize its customers' information systems, to support their business.

Bull operates in high added-value markets including computer simulation, Cloud computing and 'computing power plants', outsourcing and security.

Currently Bull employs around 9,000 people across more than 50 countries, with over 700 staff totally focused on R&D. In 2011, Bull recorded revenues of €1.3 billion.

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