Johannesburg, 23 Oct 2014
Graham Parker, recently appointed managing director of Britehouse's Microsoft specialist division, 3fifteen, is redefining the company's Microsoft strategy in relation to the vendor's own roadmap as well as ever-increasing customer requirements for a digital approach.
"We will continue to assist our existing and new customers with application development projects and, where relevant, with application development outsourcing," Parker says.
"We have 170 of the country's best developers and their primary focus, as always, will be to ensure customers have the functionality that is most appropriate to their business needs. So, for customers who have always relied on 3fifteen to keep their Microsoft systems and software relevant and contributing to their market agility and competitive edge, nothing has changed.
"However, when we do that for customers, we inherently help them digitise not just their processes, but their products and services and the way they reach their customers.
"When we develop software, we digitise a customer's ideas. And, when a customer asks us to do a development project, we automatically think in terms of the impact that project will have on the customer's digital future.
"My objective, therefore, is to proactively package and take to market, as solutions in their own right, our built-in digital insight and practical capabilities. We are masters of an extremely powerful business transformation tool that, in terms of the trends monitored by organisations such as Gartner and market research done by vendors such as Microsoft, is an essential service for the sustainability of any business."
Parker says, in support of 3fifteen's refreshed strategy, he will be driving synergies among other companies in the Britehouse stable in order to provide customers wishing to embark on a focused digital journey with a fully rounded consulting and implementation service.
Parker brings to 3fifteen's established and new operations over a decade of experience with Dimension Data, most recently as the chief operations officer of the Group's Solutions and Services business, identifying and developing new lines of business that enabled Dimension Data to diversify from a specialisation in networks to a services and solutions orientated business model.
At the beginning of his career, as a newly qualified chartered accountant, he did a stint at Deloittes in London, in the mergers and acquisitions division. A man who likes the outdoors and taking on demanding challenges, such as driving to all the game reserves in Africa in a single trip, Parker left the English winters behind in 2000 to come home to sunny South Africa. He joined Dimension Data's corporate finance department and confronted his biggest challenge at that time: managing the £1.5 billion raised to fund the company's mergers and acquisition initiatives.
"Throughout my career, I've been closely involved in both the technology and financial imperatives that drive businesses and had a close-up view of how tightly inter-related the two have now become. It is obvious to me that 3fifteen is where the two merge into a single, unified vehicle for an organisation's growth.
"Being at this kind of business model tipping point is very much what gets me up in the morning!"
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