Delpride launches BI consultancy

Data warehousing and storage management provider Delpride has launched a business intelligence consultancy called GT Consulting.

Geoff Peach, managing director at Delpride, said the IT provider's previous subsidiary, Data Warehousing Services (DWSA), was seen by customers as a data warehousing specialist.

Delpride wanted to more successfully promote its business intelligence and data reporting expertise, he said.

"We will be doing strategic consulting for business intelligence, which we were performing as a matter of course anyway. But it had been identified with the DWSA name," Peach said.

Customers would more easily understand that GT Consulting would not necessarily recommend a data warehousing solution to them than if the business intelligence was delivered via DWSA, he added.

"What we'll be pushing is to get people to maximise their existing investment in technology they made over the last four or five years," he said. "People have already spend tens of millions of dollars."

Peach said GT Consulting aim was to help companies make the best of what they had, using the technology they already had to get optimum performance, whether that involved data warehousing or not.

It would mainly target companies with 30 million transactions or more each year, he said.

Although "a number" of competitor consultancies existed in the market, such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Capgemini and Ernst & Young, GT Consulting had an edge because of its sheer physical experience with the IT involved, he said.

GT Consulting would likely take 12 to 18 months to evolve into a standalone, independent company, but Delpride had planned for that eventuality, he added.

Peach said Delpride had been talking about the plan for some eight or nine months. The new company would have five consultants -- three in Sydney and two in Melbourne -- but use other resources from Delpride as required.

GT Consulting would use Delpride's newer Sydney premises and the pre-existing site in Melbourne. Much of the needed infrastructure was already in place, he said.

The consultancy, which would complement DWSA, would target organisations that had deployed their preferred reporting and data manipulation business intelligence offerings but were still stuck at the 'silo' level, Peach said.

"The standard reply to business from most solutions vendors is to standardise on one product and all their problems will go away. Our vision sees the customer using their existing investment in technology and allowing us to recommend and build a middleware type of solution," he added.