Shrek-as-a-service: DreamWorks and Infosys team up

Outsourcer to build on animator's software

Here's an odd one: Indian outsourcer Infosys and Hollywood animation studio DreamWorks Animation have created a “strategic engineering partnership”.

The deal looks to involve Infosys running its eye over the technology DreamWorks uses to make movies and figuring out how to commercialise it. The Indian company will “... deploy its global talent pool available across cloud, big data, Java and open source capabilities to develop next generation solutions based on the DreamWorks technology.”

DreamWorks' production technology includes a substantial private cloud that runs ”Apollo”, an animation said to allow real-time design of characters and very rapid development of lighting and animation effects. Intel assisted DreamWorks to create Apollo, as it apparently does some funky things with multi-core CPUs. The studio has also developed and detailed many other graphics manipulation and creation tools.

Why would Infosys care about that kind of tool? The company operates a “products, platforms and services” division that offers a range of vertical solutions. With global enthusiasm for visualisations or all sorts rising, it's not hard to imagine that the big production and render farms that animation studios develop might be repurposed into products Infosys can sell. Or perhaps DreamWorks has just built a really, really, good private cloud Infosys will do well to rebuild for its clients.

Whatever emerges from the partnershhip, it looks like DreamWorks gets a chance to make some extra dough from assets it has to develop anyway and Infosys gets a head-start on design of potential products. The Indian company also gets great names to slap on its marketing material or future products: The Reg awaits Shrek-as-a-service, How To Train Your Servers and Kung Fu Panda: Battle for the Heavenly Cloud. ®