1st February 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.”