The potential total contract value is estimated to be up to $2.9 billion assuming the successful negotiation of all anticipated country specific agreements and the provision of the full scope of services in all the planned countries over the initial ten-and-a-half year term. Services are expected to commence under the master service agreement and one or more country specific agreements in the first half of 2010. All of the agreements are subject to regulatory and other approvals and notifications, including consultation of relevant workers councils.

Under the terms of the agreement, depending on the country specific agreements entered into, up to approximately 1,000 Zurich employees will potentially transition to CSC during the first half of 2010.

The relationship between Zurich and CSC began in July 2004 when the companies signed a seven-year, $1.3 billion applications outsourcing contract. In 2008, the scope of work expanded to include desktop services in Europe and North America.

All statements in this press release and in all future press releases that do not directly and exclusively relate to historical facts constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements represent the company’s intentions, plans, expectations and beliefs, and are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, many of which are outside the company’s control. These factors could cause actual results to differ materially from such forward-looking statements. For a written description of these factors, see the section titled “Risk Factors” in CSC’s Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended April 3, 2009 and any updating information in subsequent SEC filings. The company disclaims any intention or obligation to update these forward-looking statements whether as a result of subsequent event or otherwise, except as required by law.

CSC is a global leader in providing technology-enabled solutions and services through three primary lines of business. These include Business Solutions and Services, the Managed Services Sector and the North American Public Sector. CSC’s advanced capabilities include systems design and integration, information technology and business process outsourcing, applications software development, Web and application hosting, mission support and management consulting. Headquartered in Falls Church, Va., CSC has approximately 92,000 employees and reported revenue of $16.0 billion for the 12 months ended October 2, 2009. For more information, visit the company’s Web site at www.csc.com.

In France, the Tooway service offers a consumer broadband solution at speeds and prices meeting the “Digital France 2012″ Plan. Operating totally independently from terrestrial networks, the service enables users to establish a high-speed Internet connection using a 67cm antenna and a modem that interfaces with a user’s PC.

Designed to serve homes in metropolitan France located in grey areas, SFR’s ‘Satellite Internet Pack’ is available in two packages: either a package with a specified subscription period from 34.90EUR a month including satellite kit, or a package with no commitment to a specific subscription period from 29.90EUR a month (plus 399EUR for the satellite kit).

The service offers download speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps and between 2.4 and 4.7 GB of data downloads per month depending on subscription. An “Endless Night” option also enables users to surf the Internet on an unlimited basis between 11 pm and 7 am with no data exchange deducted from the monthly total volume. Additional services include six mailbox addresses, antivirus software and anti-spam protection. The satellite kit comes with a DVD and installation guide as well as a satellite finder and a set of cables for self-installation. For customers preferring a professional installation SFR also provides a list of approved installers.

Launched in Europe in 2007, Tooway is based on Eutelsat’s satellite coverage, the commercial and infrastructure operating experience of its Skylogic subsidiary and SurfBeam technology developed by ViaSat. This technology used by Tooway comes to Europe after acquiring extensive experience on the North American market, where ViaSat already provides the equipment and network for over 500,000 homes.

Commenting on the signature with SFR, Michel de Rosen, Eutelsat CEO said: “The selection of our new Tooway broadband service by SFR, a hallmark in telecommunications for quality service and reliability, underscores the intrinsic ability of satellite technologies to complement terrestrial networks.

“This major contract also clearly demonstrates the ability of Tooway to deliver a comparable service to terrestrial broadband networks, with ease of use and high levels of scalability that can accompany growth. It consolidates our objective for large-scale development of satellite broadband in the Ka-band using dedicated in-orbit and ground infrastructure offering both compelling prices and speeds to consumers.

“Combined with the advanced performance of the SurfBeam technology developed by ViaSat, the multi-spot KA-SAT satellite that is currently in construction by EADS Astrium will have the capacity to deliver high-speed performance to up to two million subscribers.”

“Industry research firms agree that enterprises will invest more in private cloud services than in external cloud providers through at least 2012,” said Jingwen Wang, Vice President Products, Platform Computing. “As the market takes off, customers are discovering requirements for building private clouds that virtualization of servers simply cannot address. Platform ISF, first launched as a beta product in June, is a technology-agnostic platform that supports any collection of hardware, operating systems and virtual machines, enabling IT to manage workload across both virtual and physical environments and support multiple hypervisors and operating systems from a single interface.”

Data center IT managers are seeking better ways to utilize their infrastructure assets more effectively, while maintaining or improving application service levels. Private clouds are the solution, but they require the combination of workload scheduling and resource management similar to cluster and grid computing environments. Leveraging Platform Computing’s cluster and grid expertise, Platform ISF addresses the private cloud management challenge enabling IT to achieve more effective use of their resources through metered, self-service access across their entire heterogeneous resource infrastructure.

“By turning portions of our clients’ corporate data centers into private clouds, we’re enabling companies to realize the next wave of consolidation with associated capital and operating cost savings,” said Joe Szalkiewicz, Vice President, Pinnacle Business Solutions, a division of The Pinnacle Group. “Platform ISF provides enterprise scalability through an independent management layer for operating systems and virtual machine provisioning tools.”

SAS, the leader in business analytics, has deployed Platform ISF internally to create a self-service portal for developers, allowing them to quickly and reliably provision and deploy compute and application resources. “We wanted our cloud to include both physical and virtual servers, possibilities not supported by our virtual machine management tools alone,” said Cheryl Doninger, R&D director at Cary, NC-based SAS. “It was also important that we have robust application programming and management interfaces to simplify and abstract our heterogeneous environment for our private cloud. Platform ISF provides everything we need to flexibly provision all our resources and move between physical and virtual machines when needed.”

According to Forrester principal analyst James Staten, as printed in The Industry Standard in the June 2009 article titled “Platform Computing tackles tech-agnostic cloud management,” “Platform ISF meets all the requirements needed in a cloud management product: a workload distribution engine; an infrastructure aggregation layer; a self-service portal for IT administrators; metering and monitoring; and robust APIs for integration with third-party tools. We believe [Platform ISF] is perhaps the most complete internal cloud software solution we’ve seen so far.”

Platform ISF is now publicly available for purchase and is also available for free download trials on http://www.platform.com/clouds/platform-isf. Platform ISF pricing is based on a per CPU socket license for each physical host managed as part of the Platform ISF cloud starting at US$795.

Platform Computing is the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software — serving more than 2,000 of the world’s most demanding organizations. For 17 years, our workload and resource management solutions have delivered IT responsiveness and lower costs for enterprise and HPC applications. Platform has strategic relationships with Cray, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, and SAS. Visit www.platform.com.

Today is the internet’s 40th birthday. Well, not exactly the internet but Arpanet – the Pentagon-funded research project that is the predecessor to the internet. Forty years ago, a simple message “Lo” (it was supposed to be “Login”, but the system crashed) was sent between two computers at two Californian research labs and a net was born. What happened next – the development of the now global internet, the web that you are reading this on – has had an impact on all of us. Last week, the Guardian published an interactive people’s history of the internet telling the story of how that happened and interviewing some of the people who made it so.

Charley Kline and Bill Duvall – who made that first connection between the University of California and the Stanford Research Institute – are in there, as are pioneers of politics, social interaction and gaming online.

Kline admits the importance was not recognised at the time. “It was neat that it was working … but nobody recognised that it was the beginning of something,” he says – but what would develop from that first connection has had a huge influence on how we live today.

It is also worth remembering the perhaps unexpected nature of those who made this military-funded network. Oliver Burkeman spoke to Leonard Kleinrock, the UCLA professor who led the project, for a complementary piece on how the internet changed the world for ever, noting that the Arpanet’s development into what we have today was never inevitable.

Click here to read the full story at The Guardian.

BT has introduced a service that will allow remote employees to access corporate VPNs over the public internet.

The Hybrid VPN service, which is available in 130 countries, can be introduced across a business’s international locations quickly, as it uses the public internet, according to BT. It could also allow organisations to provide VPN access to employees in places too distant or too expensive to be covered by their private VPN.

“When you get outside big cities in places like America, Australia or Africa, connectivity becomes incredibly expensive, and Hybrid VPN will be significantly cheaper than the alternatives,” said James Moore, head of marketing with BT Optical and Ethernet Services.

The service could mean that companies do not have to maintain several contracts with ISPs across a number of countries. BT also expects the new service to be used as a backup for primary corporate VPN systems that use private circuits and satellite internet access.

Hybrid VPN is being provided via BT’s global 21CN, an IP-based network used to deliver IT services. It is part of the BT Intelligent Networks line of products. The company said it will shortly roll out a Hybrid VPN for customers of its Intelligent Virtual Private Network (iVPN) service, which is based on multi-label protocol switching (MPLS).

The pricing of the new service will be critical, according to Scott Morrison, a research analyst at Gartner. “This is something most of the big carriers are doing — Verizon and AT&T offer this, and in the UK companies like Cable & Wireless and Orange Business Services have done similar things,” said Morrison. “BT will need to make the pricing attractive in the market, without under-cutting and potentially cannibalising its MPLS business.”

Read more at zdnet.co.uk.

CSC’s Cloud Adoption Assessment gives businesses a head start in understanding the complexity of the Cloud Computing ecosystem. The new service performs a process-centric analysis of a company’s existing technology set-up using a Suitability Scorecard. By focusing on business processes, rather than on infrastructures or architectures, CSC creates a top-down assessment that maps to the company’s strategic objectives. Originally developed in the UK, the service will be made available to companies across Europe, Australia and the USA beginning in late November.

The CSC Cloud Adoption Assessment helps businesses reach the right decisions to make the shift to Cloud Computing a successful experience. At the end of a three-week assessment, businesses will receive a tailored Cloud adoption roadmap for the target processes and a high-level benefits assessment. They will also receive an understanding of:

> How to align their Cloud Computing strategy with their business
strategy
> Which parts of their business are suitable for moving to a Cloud-based
delivery model and which aren’t
> How much of each process they should put into the cloud: whether they
should retain control in house, but use Cloud-based infrastructure,
buy the entire process in as a service, or something in between
> Which services are enterprise-ready and offer the right levels of
security and governance for their business

> The impact on procurement and what to consider before signing on the
dotted line.

Ron Brown, CSC’s Director, Cloud Computing EMEA commented: “We developed this service in response to requests from clients. Many companies are already using Cloud-based services and others would like to, but there is a great deal of confusion around Cloud Computing, and what is right for one company may not be right for another.”

“By taking a strategically streamlined approach and evaluating the best course of action for each individual enterprise, we can help organizations maximize the benefits and reduce the risk associated with Cloud Computing,” said Brian Boruff, vice president of Global Cloud Computing for CSC. “Our efforts to bring Digital Trust to the Cloud and provide transparency will be a key enabler of broad-scale enterprise adoption.”

As the world’s largest independent IT services provider, CSC offers companies impartial, unbiased advice about moving to the Cloud. Please email cloud@csc.com to get information about CSC’s Cloud Adoption Assessment, or visit www.csc.com/cloud

CSC is a global leader in providing technology-enabled solutions and services through three primary lines of business. These include Business Solutions and Services, the Managed Services Sector and the North American Public Sector. CSC’s advanced capabilities include systems design and integration, information technology and business process outsourcing, applications software development, Web and application hosting, mission support and management consulting. Headquartered in Falls Church, Va., CSC has approximately 92,000 employees and reported revenue of $16.2 billion for the 12 months ended July 3, 2009. For more information, visit the company’s Web site at www.csc.com.

“All three of the CEAP product categories examined by Heavy Reading posted sequential growth in 2Q09, in contrast to the previous quarter when only the Ethernet-over-bonded copper pair sub-segment grew,” said Stan Hubbard, Senior Analyst at Heavy Reading and author of the CEAP Tracker. “Ethernet-over-fiber access platform sales appeared to grow most rapidly in 2Q09 and were up nearly 14 percent quarter-over-quarter as the top five suppliers in this category all appeared to grow revenues above 1Q09 numbers.”

Heavy Reading projects that the global CEAP market will increase at a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.5 percent between 2008 and 2013, reaching nearly $1.73 billion at the end of this period. Each of the three CEAP sub-segments is expected to have a double-digit CAGR.

Hubbard noted, “We expect the CEAP market to continue to hold up relatively well even in the midst of economic trouble because of the performance/price advantage that carrier Ethernet holds over legacy access technologies and because CEAP platforms are being deployed by hundreds of operators and other entities worldwide to support several of the fastest growing telecom services and applications. These include Ethernet business services, consumer triple-play/IPTV/VOD services, and mobile backhaul applications.”

Heavy Reading estimates Huawei led the Ethernet-over-fiber access platform market segment with a 14 percent share in 2Q09. Telco Systems, Cisco, ADVA, and MRV rounded out the top five Ethernet-over-fiber access platform vendors. Ciena posted the largest share gain among established suppliers of Ethernet-over-fiber access products in 2Q09.

Hatteras held onto its commanding lead of the Ethernet-over-bonded copper pair platform segment after posting another quarter of sequential growth in 2Q09. No. 2 Adtran and No. 3 Actelis also reported forward progress in the quarter. Other Ethernet-over-bonded copper pair platform suppliers with notable shares include RAD, NexComm, Positron, and Zhone.

Overture Networks gained several share points and maintained its solid No. 1 position in the competitive Ethernet-over-TDM access circuit market. ANDA edged out RAD for the No. 2 spot. Other suppliers include ADVA and nearly a dozen additional vendors with small market share.

Heavy Reading has identified 74 equipment manufacturers that sell nearly a dozen major types of wireline equipment for Ethernet access, including the three types of next-generation CEAP solutions the research firm tracks: Ethernet-over-fiber access platforms, Ethernet-over-TDM access circuit platforms, Ethernet-over-bonded copper pair platforms.

Heavy Reading’s CEAP Quarterly Market Tracker delivers quarter-by-quarter revenue and market-share breakouts for profiled CEAP suppliers and revenue projections through 2013. The quarterly tracking service also analyzes each profiled vendor’s market strategy and identifies and analyzes customer wins, providing granular insight into this emerging market sector unavailable from other sources. It provides a comprehensive list of more than 200 operators and other entities around the world that have purchased CEAP platforms.

The CEAP Quarterly Market Tracker provides in-depth analysis of 13 vendors that are now generating sales from CEAP products. These include: Actelis Networks, Adtran, ADVA Optical Networking, Aktino, ANDA Networks, Ciena Communications, Hatteras Networks, MRV Communications, NexComm Systems, Overture Networks, RAD Communications, Telco Systems, and Zhone Technologies.

The CEAP Quarterly Market Tracker is distributed in a convenient, plug-and-play PowerPoint format. Quarterly reports may be purchased individually or as part of an annual subscription service.

Network equipment giant Cisco Systems is feeling good enough about the economy to rev up its acquisition engine, pledging to spend more than $6 billion in a single month on smaller companies.

Cisco on Tuesday announced its third acquisition this month and its sixth acquisition so far this year. The company said it plans to buy Web-based security software company ScanSafe for about $183 million in cash.

Two weeks ago the company announced plans to buy wireless equipment maker Starent Networks for $2.9 billion. And at the beginning of the month, it said it would buy Norwegian video conference equipment maker Tandberg for $3 billion

After a brief acquisition hiatus the past year during the economic downturn, Cisco is back in the merger and acquisition saddle. In all of 2008, Cisco bought five companies, all well below the $1 billion price tag. In 2007, it bought a total of 11 companies, including the $2.9 billion purchase of WebEx.

Read the full story at cnet.com.