SPI and IBM SA are assisting in the City of Johannesburg's (CoJ's) R500-million outsourcing contract of its Information Technology (IT) department to the Sebedisana consortium.
Amelia Basson, IBM SA project executive for the Sebedisana project - the biggest of its kind in South Africa - says the city wishes to be an African World Class City by 2010.
"To achieve this, it needed world-class technology systems, and the fastest and most cost-effective way to achieve this was to outsource its IT systems and services to Sebedisana in October 2000."
Basson says the Sebedisana consortium consists of IBM SA's strategic outsourcing business unit, which is part of the world's largest IT services provider, IBM Global Services, and black-owned and -managed Masana Technologies.
"In its five-year outsourcing contract with the CoJ, Sebedisana supports the city's databases and maintains its operating systems - including hardware upgrades such as server and desktop transformations. It also sets technology standards and ensures network reliability," she says.
CoJ's technology includes two Hewlett-Packard servers running the SPI applications, Xi-Batch, an advanced job scheduling system, and the Xi-Text output spooling system.
"The servers and SPI's output management solution provide an easy interface for users to handle batch runs and printing from the CoJ's billing system, Venus," notes Basson.
Xi-Text enables COJ users to view queued print jobs and route and reprint such documents, while several document copies can also be printed to various printers simultaneously.
"Rerunning print jobs to produce multiple outputs is therefore eliminated, and because business data is transferred faster, costs are reduced and business efficiency is increased."
As part of the outsourcing project, Sebedisana and SPI work closely together to maintain these systems and ensure they perform to world-class standards.
Basson says having outsourced its IT, the city is free to focus on its core business - serving its residents - while Sebedisana and SPI ensure the city's technological environment is stable and up and running. "In the process, the city has been able to improve its infrastructure, build an intelligent technology environment, standardise facilities and data across six local councils, and ensure that its management systems are professionally cared for."
Basson says together with the CoJ, Sebedisana also works on designing and implementing strategies to move the city to e-government.
The project is further committed to benefit South Africa's IT industry in general through black economic empowerment and capacity building.
"Masana took over some of the city's IT staff, while IBM SA provides them with rapid skills transfer and certification on essential technologies, as well as hands-on, in-service training on running a business and such a large outsourcing contract."
Fanus K"uhn, SPI channel manager, says through its continued support of the CoJ solution, SPI has developed an excellent relationship with IBM.
"SPI and IBM SA's strategic outsourcing business unit also work closely on Xi-Text and Xi-Batch implementations on a number of other outsourcing contracts, he concludes.
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