Global giants BT and HP have today announced the launch of the BT HP Alliance in South Africa.
The alliance brings together the world-class capabilities of HP and BT to provide a full IT and telecommunications service capability in a single service offering.
Formed in May 2004, the BT HP Alliance addresses the global trend towards strategic outsourcing and the convergence and integration of IT and Communications platforms.
Typically, the alliance provides 'networked IT' services with BT leading on communications services such as WAN and LAN, while HP meets the desktop management and IT needs, alleviating many of the problems associated with managing multiple suppliers.
One of the main attractions for customers, from the consumer to the largest multinational corporation, is that the alliance offers a pre-integrated IT and communications services platform. With the integration built-in upfront, the alliance proposition results in a single point of contact to enterprises for end-to-end service delivery thereby increasing efficiencies, improving service standards, and reducing risk.
"We believe that the BT HP Alliance proposition is highly appropriate for the South African market given that South Africa is fast becoming a key participant in the global economy, " commented Lucy Dimes, BT's Global Managing Director of the BT HP Alliance. "South African companies now have a unique opportunity to adapt to changing competitive or market conditions by consolidating service providers while enhancing business efficacy and managing costs."
In forming the alliance, BT and HP invested in a new combined global infrastructure - Integrated Services Delivery - which has created efficiencies of scale and innovation, improved service delivery capacity and created access to the latest technology in a low-risk way for customers.
Building upon the services and the same standard of excellence achieved in each other's organisations, BT and HP have developed Unified Workplace, one of several propositions. It encompasses best-in-class desktop, voice, network and back-end services, providing scalable and adaptive IT resources based on a utility pricing model.
For CIOs faced with constantly changing end-user demands, while trying to maintain control on costs, the Unified Workplace offering delivers a converged service with flexible provisioning and predictable costs.
The BT HP Alliance has proved highly successful and by mid-2007, it had 41 customers, most of which are European, but also including a fair number of global customers. One of those global customers is the mining company, Anglo-American, the alliance's biggest win to date. The value of the Anglo-American deal, signed in February 2007, is worth approximately $450 million for a seven-year contract. It involves the outsourcing of the company's global voice services, data centre operations and end-user workplace management. Integrated services have been embedded in the project from day one.
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