BCX, Mincom punt mining IT

Johannesburg, 29 Jul 2008

Australian mining software developer Mincom and local BEE technology group Business Connexion (BCX) say they have made a strategic tie to provide better and more integrated business solutions and services to SA`s mining industry.

The two companies have been working together informally for several years through mutual customers such as AngloGold Ashanti and Lonmin, says Mincom Africa MD Mike Evans.

"We have decided the time is ripe to both strengthen and develop that relationship into a formal business partnership and help our customers capitalise on our complementary strengths."

BCX industry executive for the mining sector Pierre Lundberg says the move comes in anticipation of greater convergence between corporate and industrial IT.

He adds that the latter has long "been the domain of the engineers and operational systems, and largely invisible to corporate IT."

SA-based Mincom vice-president of mining Dave Stevenson says their Intelligent Mining Solution is designed to holistically cover the mining value chain from exploration through to outbound logistics.

"We have a identified a significant gap between the operational world of mining with its real-time generation of copious data volumes, and the rarified transactional world of mine management with its more traditional focus on time-bucketed financial, asset and statistical data," he says.

"Our solutions, built on a common architecture, are designed to bridge this gap, adding business context to the operational data, and allowing visualisation of all aggregated operational data, directly from source, in a common framework."

"There isn`t anyone else offering this today as an integrated application suite [and] Mincom is poised to become the de-facto technical mining solution of choice having added over 15 new customers in the last 3 months," Stevenson says.

"Having a partner like BCX will enable us to meet the needs of many more prospects than we would otherwise have been able to reach out to."