AST Offshore Development (OSD), a division of the AST Group, has entered into a strategic alliance partnership with French-owned CS Rand, a leading provider of IT Services, based in the UK. CS Rand will provide AST OSD with an immediate delivery support capability in the UK, for its remote service offerings.
AST OSD has developed a range of practical offerings aimed at providing high quality, remote application development and maintenance services for the international market. These services and offerings are provided from Offshore Development Centres in South Africa.
"In order to maximise the opportunity of introducing remote IT offerings to international clients in a meaningful manner, AST OSD is securing business partners who will provide complementary or value-added services in the international target markets, and who are interested in either using our services directly or promoting our services to customers," explains Mark Dale, MD of AST OSD.
CS Rand delivers business solutions with core competencies in systems evolution, integration, application development, data management and testing, primarily within the UK and Ireland, and also within mainland Europe.
"Our major strengths lie in our strong relationships with clients in the insurance, financial services, telecoms and utilities sectors of the UK marketplace. These relationships are based upon our reputation for delivering quality, independent and professional services," points out Roy Stew, MD of CS Rand. "This Partnership will ensure we extend the size and variety of our resource pool, allowing us to provide our clients with more cost effective integrated enterprise application services, on a wider scale than ever before."
CS Rand has developed partnerships with major system integrators, eCRM and EAI vendors and has strategic relationships with several complementary partners including Sun, ICL and Oracle. CS Rand is an Oracle Certified Solution Partner. Working closely with their partners, CS Rand delivers integrated services across a range of IT environments, including client server, legacy and mainframe.
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AST Group
Listed in the Technology sector of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, the AST Group stands out as a solid, well-managed company, known for its integrity and showing a sustained record of success. AST is a substantial company with a market capitalisation in excess of R2billion (Feb 2000), and is active throughout South Africa, with a growing presence in other Southern African states, Australia and the UK.
The ICT Services Division represents the heart of AST`s business today. With its wall-to-wall capabilities, including management consultation, this group provides services across the entire plan-build-run-leverage life cycle of ICT solutions, for all environments and at every level of the client`s hierarchy of needs - including comprehensive, integrated solutions.
The Industry Solutions Division of AST leverages specialised knowledge in the industries of manufacturing, mining, financial services, government and telecommunications. AST also has expertise in other industries as diverse as retail and tourism.
Through its e-Business Division, AST assists its clients in exploiting the immense business opportunities presented by customer relations management, knowledge management and e-commerce, while ensuring business integrity and security. This Division also has the entrepreneurial role of launching e-commerce ventures, providing exciting growth for AST and its partners.
AST also provides business services, both dedicated and shared, on a transaction basis, sharing risks and rewards with its partners. The company manages an immense ICT infrastructure, consisting of several mainframes, numerous UNIX platforms and hundreds of client server platforms. This facility provides an exceptional opportunity for hosting applications and e-commerce ventures in a truly secure and stable environment.
CS Rand
CS Rand operates throughout the UK and Europe delivering solutions and services that enable businesses to optimise the performance of their existing legacy applications and move to an integrated web-enabled e-business environment. CS Rand`s client base includes major players within the insurance, banking, utilities and telecommunications sectors.
CS Rand (formerly known as Rand Information Systems Ltd) is part of the global CS Communications & Systems Group and belongs to the Information Systems Division. The CS Group employs some 5,000 people world-wide and is France`s fourth largest technology group with a 1999 turnover of around lb350 million.
CS Rand is a leading provider of IT services within the UK and Ireland. It delivers integrated business solutions for the connected economy, with core competencies in systems evolution, integration, application development, data management and testing. In collaboration with strategic partners, it designs and delivers solutions that help organisations evolve and maximise the return on their existing investments. By combining people, business expertise and technology, CS Rand provides solutions which help organisations gain competitive advantage by leveraging their existing system capabilities and extracting the most from data.
CS Rand has implemented solutions for clients such as National Australia Bank, Lloyds TSB, Scottish Power, National Grid Company plc, British Gas, Saga Services, Norwich Union, CGNU, AXA, Panasonic, the RAF and Warner Music.
For more information visit www.csrand.co.uk