Cape Town, 01 Aug 2011
Momentum Employee Benefits has signed a four-year service-based support agreement with Alacrity to maintain an existing IT platform, while the migration towards a consolidated platform takes place, in addition to undertaking development work on specific applications that will assist the merged company achieve the agreed growth strategy and overall objectives.
There is always complexity when companies merge, and more so when they're two of South Africa's largest companies and leading brands, Metropolitan and Momentum.
“Choosing the right IT platforms to maintain operations while gearing the company for growth, retaining core skills and mitigating risk were some of the greatest challenges faced by our companies,” comments Chris Reyneke, CIO for Momentum Employee Benefits. “After embarking on a process to define the IT strategy for the future company, the decision to migrate the employee benefits IT system onto Momentum's platform was taken, but we also knew that this would take time, and we needed a partner to help us maintain certain legacy components while we focused our development efforts on the target platform.”
National IT services and software company, Alacrity, has been a technology partner to both Momentum and Metropolitan for over 10 years. “Given our experience in supporting legacy technology systems, which was really the start of our company over 10 years ago, the fact that we understood the technology environments of both Metropolitan and Momentum, and the high trust we share with them, we're delighted to be appointed to continue working with the team,” adds Brian Ford, CEO of Alacrity.
The deal that became effective on 1 July 2011 is structured in two parts over four years; the first two years focus on the migration of the risk and retirement book of business, while the latter two years focus on the migration of the investment book. In line with the agreement, Alacrity has employed a number of the IT staff previously employed by Metropolitan EB. The option to join Alacrity provided these staff with future career options within Alacrity, while at the same time retaining their skills to support the legacy systems during the migration period.
“This agreement is critical to the success of our company, the impact to us would be severe if we ignored the system maintenance during the migration phases. By putting this deal in place we are in a position to achieve the synergies that underpin the intention of the merger, and as a result we have freed up our IT department to concentrate on developing new platforms with a focus on innovation. It's important for us not to keep our focus so internal that we neglect our delivery to our clients and our market position,” adds Reyneke. “We're now confident that all bases are covered; Alacrity has a long history of excellent delivery, high trust and integrity. It's a win-win for all parties involved.”
“Alacrity's role is to provide as much stability to the business as possible. We have been impressed by Momentum's decisive action in finalising the merger and this agreement with us, and equally excited by the calibre of people that we have employed from them. In addition to a strong alignment in cultures, which has seen a seamless transition of staff migrate across to us, we have bolstered our Java capability and Agile skills, which both fit within our strategic imperatives,” concludes Ford.