ICL, the solutions and services provider, and Centricity, the customer information specialist, today announced a partnership around ICL`s business intelligence (BI) offering, WebFOCUS.
Phillip Duncan, Business Intelligence Executive, says: "Centricity is the first partner in the recently launched InfoElite Partner Programme. We spent some time structuring the agreement to ensure maximum benefit for customers and the industry. This partnership creates a new market offering where companies with complex technology systems will benefit."
Garth Hayward, CEO of Centricity, adds: "Consultation with customers identified a definite need for this kind of solution. ICL`s technology expertise in the BI arena, coupled with Centricity`s expertise in aligning a customer`s strategic information with its people, processes and technology create an immensely competitive capability."
Centricity, which also fulfils Grintek`s information technology requirements, believes that the basis of testing strategy expression within an organisation lies in the adequacy of information used by that organisation.
Hayward explains: "Does the information that the organisation uses support the achievement of the strategy? Statistics show that over 40% of information used by organisations does not supply what is necessary for an organisation to remain competitive. Centricity analyses organisational information and measures it against the five primary attributes of valuable information, namely completeness, relevance, accuracy, timeliness and accessibility.
"We evaluated all the top BI products on the market and found that Information Builders` WebFOCUS, distributed by ICL Africa, has what it takes to ensure optimal alignment between an organisation`s strategic information and its technology."
"ICL can not simply deliver the technology and walk away," comments Duncan, "We realised the niched value that Centricity can offer in supplying the customer with a holistic service to really align what we do with maximum business value."
Hayward agrees and adds that Centricity, being a SME, needed to partner with a large, established organisation with a proven track record in the BI field. "One only needs to look at Information Builders` history to know the value of this partnership."
"In simple terms, the ICL and Centricity partnership delivers the bridge between a company`s information technology and its business` strategy," Duncan concludes.
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ICL is one of Europe`s leading e-business services companies and employs more than 20 000 people in 40 countries. It designs, builds and operates innovative solutions for customers in the financial services, telecoms, retail, government, utilities and travel markets. ICL helps its customers to transform their businesses and make them more efficient and productive, by providing the IT services needed today together with the end-to-end e-business services to be successful in the new economy. These services include new media design, consultancy and systems integration through to managed infrastructure services that underpin the mission-critical requirements of businesses.
For the year ended 31 March 2000, the company`s revenues were lb2 774.6 million. Headquartered in London, ICL is wholly owned by Fujitsu Limited, a lb31 billion leader in Internet-based IT solutions for the global marketplace. ICL is the European-centred arm of Fujitsu`s global IT services strategy.