Sagent and Cap Gemini EY form alliance

Susan Andre2002

Sagent, the leading provider of business intelligence solutions, and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young U.S. LLC (CGE&Y), member firm of one of the largest management and IT consulting firms in the world, announced they have formed an alliance allowing CGE&Y to transparently integrate Sagent's technology and distribute it to the consulting firm's customers. This alliance is aimed at helping companies rapidly create high-quality, cost-effective analytical applications for business intelligence and customer relationship management systems, using Sagent's business intelligence solution.

"The business intelligence market will continue to grow over the next several years, and our relationship with Sagent allows us to capitalize on this growth by delivering a wider range of scalable, enterprise solutions to the market," said Brian Queenin, vice president and practice leader for Business Intelligence, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young U.S. LLC.

Through this joint effort, Sagent and CGE&Y are quickly and successfully implementing the Sagent Solution for a leading global media company based in New York City, and a leading food products company located in St. Louis.

The Sagent Solution will be delivered to CGE&Y customers via CGE&Y's Advanced Development Centres (ADC), a part of the CGE&Y network of ISO9001 facilities primarily focused on custom technology solutions co-developed with clients and designed to improve speed of design and predictability of development. Within the ADC network is CGE&Y's Business Intelligence Centre of Excellence (COE), which is the arm of the ADC network responsible for the development, maintenance and preparation of showcasing the solutions developed. The solutions developed at the COE are defined as accelerators that help consulting teams start on new engagements. The COE also maintains leading practices for the development of data warehouse dimensional models, ETL practices and development with OLAP tools.

"As we embark on delivering the Sagent Solution to our clients, our network will accelerate project delivery with zero start-up time for CGE&Y customers who are looking to implement solutions for business intelligence or a complete data warehouse," said Mark P. Richardson, vice president, Critical Technologies/Information Management, CGE&Y U.S. LLC. "With this alliance, we will ensure that our customers transparently implementing the Sagent Solution will get 'speed, with quality.' "
"Now that we are being included in the ADC network, the visibility of our open and complete business intelligence solution will be greatly elevated and we will be able to leverage some of the best BI capabilities available," said Steve van den Berg, vice president, business development, Sagent. "As part of this alliance, we will train CGE&Y consultants and provide CGE&Y customers ongoing technical support for the business intelligence and data warehousing solution the two companies are developing."

Sagent is looking at implementing the alliance as a global programme over time. The Sagent Southern Africa relationship with Cap Gemini is at an early stage.

Cap Gemini Ernst & Young

Cap Gemini Ernst & Young is one of the largest management and IT consulting firms in the world. The company offers management and IT consulting services, systems integration, and technology development, design and outsourcing capabilities on a global scale to help businesses continue to implement growth strategies and leverage technology in the new economy. The organization employs about 57,000 people worldwide and reports global revenues of about 8.5 billion euros (2000 pro forma).

Sagent

Sagent offers a complete business intelligence software platform that allows business users and IT to work together to integrate, analyse, deliver and understand information. Sagent enables developers to easily build custom analytic solutions using this open, standards-based platform with components that meet enterprise requirements and support a complete development life cycle.

More than 1,500 companies have selected Sagent software to organize disparate data and support thousands of users as they pursue reduced costs, increased profitability, improved customer retention, and competitive advantage. Customers include: 7-Eleven-Mexico, AT&T, Boeing Employees Credit Union, Bristol Meyers, British Telecom, California State Automobile Association, Citibank, GlaxoSmithKline, GPU Energy, Jiffy Lube, Johnson & Johnson (UK), Kemper National Insurance, Mentor Graphics, Peoplefirst.com, Provident Central Credit Union, Siemens, Credit Guarantee and Gensec. As a technology company focused on business solutions, Sagent partners with leading regional and global systems integrators, OEMs and independent software vendors to leverage third-party business expertise and presence in the global marketplace. Strategic relationships include companies such as Advent Software, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Hyperion Solutions, IBM, KPMG, Microsoft, SAS, Satyam, and Sun Microsystems. Sagent is headquartered in Mountain View, California.

The Sagent Southern Africa head office can be contacted on (011) 258 8739 or at www.sagent.co.za.