Dutch IT services company Origin BV today launches a major overhaul to its services offerings which it believes will maximize the business benefits of outsourcing while simultaneously overcoming the wariness of potential customers. The new raft of services, called Overture, brings together a diverse set of contracting principles within a flexible framework that puts a new spin on the traditional customer/supplier relationship. It also marks the Eindhoven-based company’s formal entry into the burgeoning application service provider (ASP) market.
Overture, which takes in Origin’s portfolio of enterprise application and infrastructure management services, aims to make outsourcing contracts as simple as possible, avoiding the difficulties of over-complicated relationships. Unlike most outsourcing arrangements where customer and supplier maintain an arms length relationship, Origin wants to be seen as a trusted partner rather than simply a supplier helping overcome the wariness that potential customers often have towards outsourcing.
Most radically, Origin will offer to form a joint venture – not necessarily market facing – which will take responsibility for all aspects of the partnership, including the management of the partnership, the driving and funding of innovation and control of change, finances and the ownership of key resources. The joint venture may also sell products and services in its own right and may include other interested parties including the customer’s business partners or representatives of key software suppliers.
This shared responsibility value embodied by the joint venture initiative is only one of seven principles included within Overture’s most prestigious offering, described by Origin as enterprise lifecycle management (ELM) services. As well as the expected operations management and business continuity responsibilities, ELM contracts give Origin responsibility for innovation, consulting and implementation. The aim is to drastically cut the time taken for a customer’s management to respond to changes in business processes brought about through new technologies, which can be as much as five to eight years in the case of business management decisions.
Origin will keep abreast of the latest developments to technology and business practice through the use of strategic information partners, which are set to be announced in October. It will then push active innovation on the basis of this research which will in turn drive business improvements and generate shared profits. This will be further boosted by giving customers access to Origin’s knowledge-base containing extensive information on business practices and applications.
In two related announcements Origin has licensed IntelliCorp’s LiveModel and LiveCompass products to help audit customer’s enterprise systems. It has also become the first company to license Phios Corp’s Phios Process Repository, a tool which will allow Origin consultants to map business processes, compare them with a best practices database and suggest improvements. Origin says future additions to Overture will be ongoing.
