Johannesburg, 20 Sep 2011
FOXit, together with its partner PwC Exordia, a division of PricewaterhouseCoopers, has rolled out the first true locally available enterprise project management (EPM) cloud services offering.
FOXit is a national provider of solutions, service and support focused on project and portfolio management in business. The company specialises in providing products and consulting services to South Africa's mining sector and related industries.
PwC Exordia is a Microsoft Gold Hosting Partner, with more than 10 years of experience in the delivery of hosted services. Its current cloud service portfolio includes software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) in both private and public cloud models.
The company provides a range of hosted offerings, including Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange and now Microsoft Project Server 2010, better known as the Microsoft EPM/PPM solution.
FOXit and PwC Exordia have combined their relevant expertise to develop and introduce a fully pre-configured, out-of-the-box hosted project solution that enables any business to take advantage of cloud-based EPM.
PwC has provided the underlying infrastructure and FOXit the various product sets combined to add value.
“It is really a groundbreaking EPM solution,” says Albie Bester, Chief Technology Officer, PwC Exordia. “It can be pre-configured to suit the business environment of any client that runs a venture according to the principles of project management. It is a unique offering as it also caters for any project methodology. There are not many players in the market who provide hosted project offerings tied in with local data centres. Latency tends to be a challenge with internationally hosted offerings, and the issue of data location starts to run into compliance challenges. Locally hosted cloud services addresses both these issues.”
FOXit has added solution sets such as hosted EPM, PPM and EPM Foundation, to enable the user to gain immediate value from cloud services. The company also provides full training and support online with a lead-time on implementation of just three days.
One of the main aims of the partnership in introducing the solution was to demonstrate how bringing EPM into the cloud can help clients manage their resources better and run operations in accordance with corporate governance, with efficiency and less cost.
The idea was to bring about a solution that was versatile, that would offer users the best of both worlds - access to the cloud, with the option to retain an on-premise control if required. The ability to mix cloud services and on-premises services is truly unique, and this provides even more flexibility to the client.
“This is a powerful, credible operational platform that can be acquired on a month-to-month basis, making it affordable and of instant value, irrespective of the skills level and IT capability within the organisation. It is cost-competitive - calculated and proven to be about 50% more cost-effective than other solutions currently available,” says Aldo van Tonder, CEO of FOXit.
This solution offers access to information technology services and the ability to expand and reach markets that were typically not available for a South African organisation.
“Combined with our other world-class data visualisation and workflow products, this solution will change the way day-to-day work is perceived. It definitely puts project management tools in reach of organisations that typically had limitations on either budget or internal support,” Van Tonder adds.
Management from both companies anticipate a strong response from the market, particularly in light of the growing demand for project server solutions and the pressure of governance.
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