A small number of successful IT projects in the public sector have resulted in cost savings of €4.5m, Irish IT services company Origina said today. The company is forecasting €3m in new revenues and 50 new customers by year end.
The company has also unveiled a new benchmarking matrix. The matrix is a fully independent end-to-end review of an organisation’s IT infrastructure which is scored against 10 key criteria, including cost, international best practices, external regulatory requirements, performance, manageability, stability, performance, rationalisation and agility.
An initial identification assessment aims for rapid results, with root-cause analysis then available across five technology pillars, including data storage, server architecture, applications, network architecture and disaster recovery.
The new service has six dedicated senior technology experts with team numbers expected to double before year end.
Origina says it is forecasting 50 customers and €3m in new revenue from services before year end.
The company also intends to competitively target Gartner and is being guided by Enterprise Ireland in identifying growth opportunities in international markets.
The Origina Benchmarking Matrix
Origina designed the new service – the ‘Origina Benchmarking Matrix’ – over the past 12 months.
It was developed following in-depth research, including discussions with leading international industry groups and analysts, weekly in-house ‘think tanks’ by Origina’s innovation team, and more than 75 detailed interviews and forums with C-level executives across all verticals, including the public sector. Origina also simultaneously carried out a number of end-to-end pilot IT audits for private and public-sector customers.
The €4.5m savings achieved across a small number of government organisations has provided Origina with a strong reference point for its new benchmarking service. Origina carried out in-depth audits of each public-sector client’s IT infrastructure to develop a baseline to illustrate how all computing resources were being used.
Savings were generated in a number of areas, including capital expenditure savings, power savings and more than €1.5m was saved through the identification of inefficient licence usage which were re-used to offset new licence purchases.
“We believe our new service is particularly suitable for the Irish public sector,” said Rowan O’Donoghue, director of innovation and development at Origina.
“All Government departments and state bodies are looking to eradicate wasteful expenditure, while at the same time seeking to enhance the performance of their systems and online platforms to deliver better public services.”
“We are constantly surprised that so many organisations have no centralised view of their IT infrastructure and business applications. We see many paying for hundreds of software licences that are not needed, dozens of physical servers that have little or no business data stored, and they continue to throw extra bandwidth at entire networks that simply need to have bottlenecks removed,” continued O’Donoghue.
Irish compliance and data protection scores
Early results from Origina’s benchmarking pilots have seen Irish public and private-sector organisations score lower than their international counterparts in the areas of data protection and compliance. This may be due to more stringent regulations in other countries, such as the US and UK.
“Our new benchmarking service allows us to bring CIOs and CFOs together, and provide them with qualitative and quantitative measurements of their IT infrastructures against their business goals and recognised industry standards,” Tomás O’Leary, managing director, Origina, said.
“The results give them a clear understanding of how their IT systems, applications and people are performing, and allow them to make more informed business decisions.”
“We have looked at local and international markets to see who our competition is in this area and we believe that only Gartner are providing a similar vendor-neutral service to ours. The difference is that we are lower cost and will find tangible results quicker,” continued O’Leary.
