 |
|
DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
|
Applications:
BEA, ACCENTURE JOIN FORCES TO
UNTANGLE WEB SPRAWL
BEA Systems Inc, a leading application infrastructure software company, and
Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing
company, announced a joint eCommerce and Portal Rationalization offering aimed
at helping large enterprises untangle the web of customer, employee and
partner portals that can contribute to the high cost of complexity in
enterprises. The eCommerce and Portal Rationalization offering, which
leverages the BEA WebLogic Platform, and Accenture's capabilities in Java-
based Web interaction, is designed to reduce the complexity that hinders
companies from achieving among other things, increased visibility into real-
time business performance and improved customer service. The news follows on
the recent launch of BEA's Enterprise Portal Rationalization (EPR)
strategy.
Based on a Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA), the joint approach of BEA
and
Accenture can help enable IT organizations to repeatedly leverage key
functionality across Web applications, and can help reduce the cost and time
required to implement and maintain systems that support new business
requirements. Together, BEA and Accenture have already helped many
organizations rationalize their IT environments, and realize significant
savings on the total cost of ownership of their customer, employee and
partner-facing systems, while simplifying and improving employee productivity
and user experience.
Web services, utility computing, .NET, CPU harvesting and distributed
computing are just a few of the technologies that fall under the Grid
computing umbrella. Gt04 -- a premiere enterprise Grid computing conference
targeting industrial and commercial users -- will gather experts, and outline
strategies and road maps for Grid deployment. For more information, visit
www.gt04.com.
Grid computing is here!
The Federal Government of Belgium created a unified citizen self-service
portal that has enabled 15 federal agencies to provide citizens, civil
servants and businesses with timely, convenient and secure access to
government information and services in four languages. Said Peter Strickx,
chief technology officer at The Federal Public Agency for Information and
Communication Technology (FEDICT): "In order for Belgium, its people and the
economy to benefit fully from the information age, we needed to empower people
with tools such as the new e-government portal that brings fast access to
information and services. BEA and Accenture are helping us realize our vision
by automating and unifying the administrative processes of interacting with
the government."
According to Jos Vranken, an Accenture partner, BEA WebLogic Platform was
selected to be the foundation of Belgium's self-service portal because its
unified end-to-end platform is designed to eliminate the need to create an IT
environment from a patchwork of point products. Additionally, the flexibility
of the BEA WebLogic Platform, as well as the ability to help integrate into a
heterogeneous environment and services-oriented architecture (SOA) approach
were critical to the success of the project.
"Critics said our IT rollout schedule would be impossible to meet. We
proved
them wrong. By leveraging our team's deep technology experience and
methodologies we were able to deliver results on time against an extremely
aggressive schedule for a project of this scope and complexity."
"The new e-government portal is the start of a new era for the Belgian
federal
government," added Strickx. "With the foundation that Accenture helped us
build on the BEA WebLogic Platform, we've established a set of standards and
best-practices that can be leveraged for future online services and for other
e-government initiatives across federal government agencies, and eventually to
other areas of Belgian government."
Other customers are seeing similar results from their rationalization
efforts.
Singapore Airlines consolidated a multitude of customer services and on-line
touchpoints onto a single customer portal, providing new services and creating
a consistent experience for customers in over 30 countries and in different 13
languages. BEA was one of SIA's partners in this consolidation effort.
"Our clients are under pressure to streamline their IT organizations,
reduce
costs and redeploy limited resources to projects of greatest business
benefits," said John Stefanchik, a partner in Accenture's Technology
Capability Group. "Accenture is teaming with BEA to provide a portal
rationalization solution that can help to achieve these goals. The BEA
WebLogic Platform is a solid foundation for consolidating both the user
interface and back-end integration portions of complex portals, and it has
delivered the functionality and scalability we need to help our joint
customers improve their business performance."
"The IT complexities within a large organization can be enormous and can
often
lead to high maintenance costs, leaving little room for new or innovative
projects," said Robert Duffner, senior director of BEA WebLogic Portal at BEA
Systems. "The BEA mission is to drive that complexity out of the enterprise;
our relationship with Accenture supplies a deep understanding of alignment
between IT strategy and business goals. Accenture can help our customers find
the right approach to portal rationalization, thereby turning what might
otherwise be a 'boil-the-ocean' endeavor into a reasonable, measured, step-by-
step approach to simplifying customer and employee interactions."
|