Faritec launches managed business intelligence service in SA

Faritec, a JSE-listed IT services company, has launched a Managed Business Intelligence (MBI) service into the South African market.

The service enables organisations to gain access to business intelligence technologies at an affordable price without committing any capital expenditure. It is a fully managed solution with all configuration, maintenance and monitoring managed remotely from Faritec`s Client Support Centre in Woodmead, Johannesburg.

Designed to allow the generation of regular static reports as well as ad hoc interrogation of data, clients use a Web access mechanism, requiring no software installed on PCs or laptops, apart from a browser, to access all of their information. Clients subscribe to the service as opposed to owning the infrastructure, thus benefiting from lower costs, with the outsourced solution approximately 30% cheaper over a three-year period as opposed to adopting an in-house purchase option.

"Faritec`s offering is a managed, hosted service that gives the benefits of specialist skills and best of breed technologies that would be unaffordable for many South African businesses," said John King, Director of Faritec Strategic IT Services. "We enable companies to collect, analyse and interpret their data with a risk-free business intelligence service from a central location using the Internet."

Faritec has consolidated a number of business intelligence technologies into the service`s platform. After examining various vendors in the industry to find the most suitable technologies, the resulting solution consists of Sun Microsystems hardware as well as Sybase ASIQ and Business Objects software. Included in the solution are all out of sight components such as disaster recovery, backups and business continuity, scalability of capacity, training, information security as well as database licences.

Faritec is responsible for the extraction, transformation and loading of customers` data into the hosted data warehouse, at predefined intervals, where the data is stored in a format appropriate to customer requirements. Faritec also develops the scripts clients require for standard reports and the solution`s Web interface allows ad hoc queries to be run at any time by clients.

Trek to the summit

00Days

:

00Hrs

:

00Min

:

00Sec

To ascertain whether an MBI service would be technically and commercially viable, Faritec carried out a four-month research project. A business case was then developed to consolidate customers onto a single hosted platform.

"Convincing clients to accept one platform and product was critical to our plans," said King. "We found that customers are very price-sensitive when it comes to BI, and while some were attached to the applications they were familiar with, mature users were more concerned with the results their BI systems delivered."

"South African companies are sitting on a wealth of information about their business. The challenge they face is harnessing that data, understanding it and making it work for them," said Roy Blume, Divisional Head - IT Services from BMI-TechKnowledge South Africa. "The difficulty they face is that they do not have the enabling systems, staff or technological infrastructure to consistently make use of this knowledge."

Blume said that an indication of this difficulty was the fact that the key `BI tool` in SA, at present, was the spreadsheet. IDC is predicting business intelligence growth globally from $4 billion in 2002 to $7.5 billion in 2006.