In February 2016, Amazon Web Services acquired NICE, an HPC specialist. The information on how Amazon will use NICE, as well as the financial terms of the purchase, have remained confidential.
NICE is a software development company from Asti, Italy that provides sophisticated grid and cloud solutions to help clients increase the productivity of using applications and computing resources. Their products and solutions are helping their clients optimize and centralize their HPC and visualization workloads. They serve customers all over the world and cover industries such as aerospace, automotive and manufacturing, energy and utilities, government, financial services and healthcare.
What will NICE bring to the table?
NICE is known for its EnginFrame and Desktop Cloud Visualization products, and their services include application grid-enablement, remote visualization, collaboration and data exchange as well as a grid intelligence.
EnginFrame is a grid-portal with a proven track record of successful production deployments within corporate networks and research grids.
Desktop Cloud Visualization (DCV) permits remote clients to access applications that are 2D or 3D interactive from heterogeneous networking infrastructures like LAN, WAN and VPN. Users benefit from its sophisticated graphics cards, rapid I/O performance and extensive Public or Private 3D Cloud memory nodes with no need for the workstations upgrade.
Amazon Web Services will benefit from NICE’s HPC offerings as well as their long list of customers from Europe with high-performance needs such as 3D games developers. This statement is supported by the fact that Amazon released additional C4 instances for this kind of high-performance customer last year.
In exploring reasons for this acquisition, we should also be reminded that Amazon Web Services is a competitor of Microsoft Azure, which purchased GreenButton—another HPC company—in 2014 as well as Google Cloud Platform and other cloud services.
Furthermore, the alliance with NICE provides Amazon with valuable intellectual property that has potential to improve the performance and functionality of the entire Amazon platform, as well as access to quality clients and a significant presence in the Middle East, Africa and Europe.
Just a few of NICE’s client bases include:
- Alcatel
- Audi
- Bosch
- Ericsson
- Ferrari
- Fiat
- Harvard Business School
- Honda
- Jaguar Land Rover
- Magellan Aerospace
- Motorola
- Red Bull
- Toyota
Given these big names and the probability that they will continue using NICE’s products, such as EnginFrame interface which is simplified for less technical users, it’s not a surprise that Amazon won’t be disrupting their service much.
It’s been said that NICE will continue operating under the existing brand and that their team will remain intact in Italy. The only change resulting from the acquisition is that they are now backed by the Amazon Web Services team. There is also a possibility to work together on the advanced HPC and visualization tools and services.
Amazon Web Services is the top company in the cloud domain, headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It’s expected that both companies will benefit from this alliance through enhanced performance.