24 May 2006
LOGICALIS & SILICON PLAINS ANNOUNCE STRATEGIC ALLIANCE TO HELP CUSTOMERS ALIGN EXISTING ICT SYSTEMS AND DATA WITH BUSINESS PROCESSES AND PEOPLE
Target Insurance, Banking and Government Sectors
Logicalis has signed a strategic alliance agreement with Premier IBM Business Partner, Silicon Plains, to provide its customers in the Insurance, Banking and Government sectors with an accelerated approach to greater business agility. This will be achieved through the implementation of Business Process Management (BPM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions.
Logicalis is already recognized as a leader in ICT consolidation and virtualization, and this simplification of IT is a necessary step towards a more agile business. However, for companies to fully exploit their ICT investments, these must be aligned with everyday business processes and people's working practices. Logicalis has already helped many customers to integrate applications and bring together important business data. This alliance with Silicon Plains will make it possible to deliver these results earlier and make project activities less IT intensive. Now, the typical payback period will be under 12 months.
The partnership will involve Silicon Plains working with Logicalis' Application Integration Practice to adopt a new technique that enables a practical Service Orientated Architecture to be deployed in months rather than years. This will result in productivity gains, increased customer services and competitive advantage improvements. The technique comprises of Silicon Plains DotSphere, industry specific process templates (for example InsureSphere), IBM Content Manager and IBM WebSphere Process Server.
As an example, for the insurance industry, the partnership will enable companies to continuously improve core underwriting, claims and customer service processes to sustain profitable growth. This is because it will enable users to select a good practice process template for claims processing, configure a single screen for each person (role) involved in that process, and then hook this into existing systems and data. DotSphere will make this all feasible in only weeks.
In addition, Logicalis and Silicon Plains are working together to evolve a set of process templates for Local Government. The resulting ‘Solution Accelerator' will be launched as Gov.Sphere during 2006 and will meet UK regulatory requirements and best practice standards. Gov.Sphere is expected to enable councils and boroughs to implement enterprise-level BPM extremely rapidly, within a three to six month time-frame.
Steven Shepherd, solution sales manager at Logicalis Computing Solutions, said, "Market leading companies not only use IT for cost saving, they also exploit its potential to do things that their competition is unable to match. IT is a competitive weapon that can transform the profitability of a business by automating and simplifying core business processes. We have seen how this is being realized by large financial institutions using the DotSphere accelerator and, as the sole UK partner for Silicon Plains, we are keen to share this method and toolkit with UK companies."
Sunil Savara, chairman of Silicon Plains, added, "Many organizations want to develop more agile and effective IT systems to provide them with lower transactional costs and competitive advantage. The challenge is to improve business user experience and convenience within a 12 month period. Silicon Plains and DotSphere are providing Logicalis with a proven answer, by enabling template processes to be quickly configured and field tested without the need for protracted IT development work. As a result the proposition is generating great interest."
Tim Robertson, Manager of CM Sales for UK, Ireland and South Africa at IBM Software Group, emphasized, "We are delighted to see two of our leading business partners get together to deliver real value to customers. Logicalis has been building a reputation as one of the UK's most innovative and skilled integrators using IBM and other complementary software. Silicon Plains is recognised for its expertise in BPM, ECM and revolutionary DotSphere software. The combination of Logicalis' breadth and local expertise with Silicon Plains' specialist BPM skills and tools makes for a powerful business transformation proposition."
About Silicon Plains
Silicon Plains is IBM's largest and most successful BPM solutions partner in the world. They have deployed BPM solutions in the largest and most complex environments including Prudential Malaysia, (across 12 countries) and Old Mutual Insurance. Other customers include Aviva, LifeCare, Sun Life and Department of Agriculture in the Philippines.
The most popular product in the Silicon Plains product range is DotSphere. Silicon Plains has successfully partitioned the user experience away from the complexities of the underlying business applications, workflow systems, imaging / content systems. This separation enables the user's experience to be unaffected by changes or migrations in legacy applications. The user experience can be configured by business analysts reducing programming workload and bring the change process closer to the business user. The Insure.Sphere and Bank.Sphere Solution Accelerators include nearly 4000 process steps as re-usable templates.
About Logicalis
Logicalis is an international provider of integrated ICT solutions, delivering secure, converged computing and communications infrastructure and services.
We can provide the architecture, deployment, integration and management of networks and systems to deliver leading edge solutions that create value for our customers and meet their business needs now and into the future.
Logicalis is a trusted provider of multi-vendor solutions and services operating in the most complex and challenging business environments. Our relationships with the industry's leading technology suppliers, combined with our business understanding enable you to invest with confidence.
The Logicalis Group is a division of Datatec Limited, a $3 billion publicly listed business. With international headquarters in the UK, the Group has operations in the US, UK, Germany, and South America.
Logicalis in the UK has achieved independent triple certification for its integrated management system, information security and IT service management offerings: ISO 9001/2000; ISO 27001 and ISO 20000 respectively.