February 11th 2008
Neocol & Barrachd Announce Strategic Alliance
Barrachd has signed a strategic alliance agreement with leading IBM Business Partner, Neocol UK, to provide its customers with an accelerated approach to greater business agility. This will be achieved through the implementation of Business Process Management (BPM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions.
Barrachd is a focussed provider of IT consolidation and virtualization to the Scottish marketplace; the simplification of IT is a necessary step towards a more agile business. However, for companies to fully exploit their technology investments, these must be aligned with everyday business processes and people's working practices.
The partnership will involve Barrachd working with Neocol’s Enterprise Content Management Practice to assist customers with productivity gains, increased customer services and competitive advantage improvements. Solutions will be delivered around market leading IBM, Filenet and Kofax software propositions and will be housed upon IBM’s leading compliance storage offerings such as the DR550 and nSeries.
As an example, for the insurance industry, the partnership will enable companies to continuously improve core underwriting, claims and customer service processes to sustain profitable growth.
Steve Ellis, Managing Director of Neocol UK said, "In today’s competitive marketplace, companies not only use IT for cost saving, they also exploit its potential to do things that their competition is unable to match. The alliance with Barrachd will enable Neocol to provide an end-to-end offering of consultancy, software and infrastructure solutions, assisting Scottish clients to transform the profitability of their business by automating and simplifying core manual processes.”
Clark Wilson, Commercial Director of Barrachd added, "“We recognised an opportunity in the Enterprise Content Management space and wanted to find a best-in-class consultancy practice to help us deliver against the requirements of our customers in Scotland. Neocol is one of IBM's leading go-to-market partners for Information Management; they have an outstanding track record. The Barrachd Neocol alliance allows us to deliver a complete solution to our Scottish customers; we are really excited by this joint proposition.”
Niall Brown, IBM Software Group Manager for Scotland emphasized, “A large proportion of the customers I meet are encountering problems in information and content management. Neocol’s dedication to Enterprise Content Management Consultancy coupled with Barrachd’s infrastructure solution skills and focus here in Scotland offers these customers a real route to addressing these challenges.”About Barrachd
Barrachd was formed in 2007 by a small team of IBM specialists. Many years of experience working for and alongside IBM highlighted that a focused approach in Scotland would allow the team to deliver solutions based upon IBM and related technologies more rapidly and cost effectively to the Scottish Private and Public Sectors.
Barrachd can, via its own resources or carefully managed partnerships, assist customers across all components of the IT solution from initial consulting, analysis and design through to implementation of an application ready solution in a customer’s data centre, hosted elsewhere or managed as a service.
Barrachd will drive commercial and technical innovation to ensure its customers derive maximum benefit from IT whilst ensuring that their businesses are safeguarded against disaster.
Barrachd’s approach is straightforward and pragmatic, open and honest. The team is keen to build long term customer relationships based upon delivering value to customers in Scotland.
About Neocol UK
Neocol works with best-in-breed vendors to architect, implement and support market leading solutions in the area of Enterprise Content Management. ECM covers all aspects of unstructured data sources, including e-mail, documents, paper, and records. Neocol aids companies with the growing concern of managing this content, streamlining access and disposition, thus streamlining overall operational efficiency of an enterprise.
Established to meet customer demand for an intelligent approach to information build-up, Neocol is the first dedicated Content Consultancy to offer highly skilled ECM and business experts to solve content management problems; turning unstructured content into valuable and realisable assets.
Neocol is one of IBM's leading go-to-market partners for Information Management and has been involved in the implementation and support of their Content Manager technology in some of the largest examples of successful archiving in the world.
