Partnerships have always been powerful enablers for IT companies to get close to new customers in markets they traditionally would not have had access to, as well as the ability to take part in deals requiring more than they could deliver alone.
South African data quality authority CenterField Software and business intelligence (BI) applications specialist GBI are cases in point.
Individually, the companies are leaders in their focus areas, and in partnership they have raised the bar on the range and quality of services they can offer customers.
"As a best-of-breed, open, component-based business intelligence (BI) solutions company, we realised early on that if the applications we supplied and implemented were to deliver the results customers required, we needed a reliable data quality solution," says Marc Scheepbouwer, CEO of GBI. "Ascential`s complete focus on data quality as a BI discipline has contributed towards superior innovation and deserved leadership in its chosen space. GBI`s respect for Ascential`s technology, important customer successes and a good working relationship with local distributor CenterField locally have seen us move even closer to one another, forming a truly compelling enterprise-centric BI value proposition."
CenterField focuses on the data lifecycle, especially the extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) process, the added service GBI required to complete the loop in providing a full BI solution to customers.
"Every BI implementation reaches the stage where the quality of corporate data comes into question," adds Julian Field, MD of CenterField. "Data is a primary driver of the enterprise, and it provides the plumbing to ensure applications function effectively and deliver results that can be trusted."
Initial enterprise BI requirements are generally localised departmental efforts that do not require enterprise-wide data integration exercises as they are based on silos of data specific to certain areas of the business.
The success of these projects quickly spreads, and BI soon expands its reach beyond the department into the wider organisation where silos of departmental data need to be integrated into an application-neutral format the company as a whole can operate from. This data store contains what Scheepbouwer describes as "one version of the truth", forming the basis for enterprise-wide BI application adoption.
"Different people and applications interpret data in unique ways," says Field. "Having a reliable store of data available to BI applications in a standard format is a crucial foundation for successful intelligence within an organisation."
"Extracting, transforming and loading data into a usable format from sources across the organisation is not a simple or inconsequential task," adds Scheepbouwer. "Making use of the appropriate tools and skills in this process assures our clients of the fastest ETL process possible, delivering the data quality needed to support effective BI application deployment."
By combining each company`s strengths, the solutions offered to customers can be bolstered to deliver unbeatable service.
Both companies expect to expand their collaborative efforts in 2004. CenterField is set to expand its range of products to deliver data solutions to a broader spectrum of companies, while Scheepbouwer sees continued adoption of business performance management applications, currently the hot BI application area, typically deployed on an enterprise-wide scale.
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