The cornerstone of the new partnership will be a Thunderhead Centre of Excellence (CoE), with HCL providing a dedicated team of 50 fully trained staff. The Centre will have a global remit, but will also help Thunderhead extend its penetration into Asian and the Middle East markets. The CoE will provide the capacity for very large scale or turn-key Thunderhead deployments.

"Our partnership with Thunderhead is a strategic opportunity for HCL, enabling us to provide leading-edge enterprise solutions for organisations that need to manage customer communications challenges on a number of fronts - such as personalisation, multiple languages, and regulatory compliance - in a connected global economy," said Stuart Drew, Senior Vice President, at HCL.

"Thunderhead's NOW platform is rapidly becoming a standard for enterprise communications, and will be the focus of a new services practice that will also show-case our existing expertise in BPM, ECM, SOA and systems integration."

"We have worked closely with HCL on a number of successful, large-scale implementation projects and have tremendous confidence in their ability to deliver Thunderhead services. Our relationship works and is clearly in demand by our customers," said Glen Manchester, CEO of Thunderhead.

"I am very pleased to have formalised our relationship with HCL in this partnership, which will take Thunderhead NOW into new geographies and industries, and notably provides us with a global services capability of impressive reach and depth," Manchester concluded.