Previous alliance partnering success acknowledged with two IBM Beacon Awards.

Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Captures Two IBM Beacon Awards

The Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Group (CGE&Y), one of the world's largest providers of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, announced that the company is the recipient of two IBM PartnerWorld Beacon awards, becoming the first IBM Global Systems Integrator to capture two of these prestigious awards in the same year. CGE&Y was honored with the Global Consultants & Integrators award for implementing an IBM e-business solution and the Rational Most Valuable Partner award for helping its clients develop higher quality software solutions faster using the IBM Rational development platform.

The IBM PartnerWorld Beacon Awards recognize IBM Business Partners that have excelled in providing quality e-business solutions and services to customers based on IBM technologies. All winners were announced at the Beacon Awards ceremony March 1 at PartnerWorld 2004 in Las Vegas.

Global Consultants & Integrators Award

This first award distinguishes CGE&Y for its successful implementation of an IBM e-business solution. The award was presented to CGE&Y as a result of its work with Abbey on its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program, One on One. Abbey is one of the UK's leading personal financial services companies with over 18 million customers.

The One On One solution will provide a market-leading CRM capability to Abbey's 12,000 customer-facing staff at over 700 locations. It delivers a single consistent view of the end customer, providing benefits such as improved sales productivity, increased product penetration, and heightened employee productivity and efficiency. One On One, based upon IBM hardware and software, as well as Siebel Systems eFinance business application software, aims to deliver higher quality customer service and greater customer retention, as well as enabled the use of marketing analytics to provide cross-sell and up-sell prompts that lead to increased “share of wallet” with the customer. This is accomplished while simultaneously lending an innovative technical platform that allows Abbey to react with speed and flexibility in the marketplace.

“Prior to working with CGE&Y and implementing One On One, our staff had to use many different product-centric systems in order to serve the customer. Customer data was spread among these heritage systems. Each silo of customer data had its own context, preventing us from attaining a consistent view of our customers,” explained Graeme Yorston, IT Director, Abbey. “One on One is imperative for us. We will be able to serve our customers better and increase our sales effectiveness, achieving greater customer satisfaction. We will accomplish this because customer information will be more readily accessible in a single place, personalized according to the needs of individual customers, and easier for our staff to understand and act upon.”

“The work of our project teams at Abbey and in other complex change programmes sets the standard that others have to follow”, said Ed Hutt, Global Alliances Organization Leader, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. “We aim to have all the contributing alliance partners, including ourselves and our joint clients, working together so that the integration is seamless. The net result of what you can see and feel is the quality of what they achieve in collaboration together.” Hutt added, “Supported by our alliance commitments to joint business development and client satisfaction, our joint clients are the true beneficiaries of this approach.”

Rational Most Valuable Partner Award

The Rational Most Valuable Partner award is presented to the company that strives to improve the software development capability of its customers with IBM's Rational software development platform. The award was presented to CGE&Y as a result of its use of Rational technology in a number of successful engagements in CGE&Y Sweden.

“The Rational Award is a result of our strength in delivering value to our customers using Rational Software products,” said Anna Hard af Segerstad, Swedish Rational Alliance Leader, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young.

CGE&Y adopted IBM's Rational Unified Process (RUP) in 2001 as the basis for providing consistency in working methods across the CGE&Y's Accelerated Delivery Centers and for use in global client engagements that involve custom software development. CGE&Y currently has 1,600 copies of Rational Software products installed in its global network of 27 Accelerated Delivery Centers, and over the last five years it has standardized the RUP, making it the foundation for its global delivery method.

“The Rational tools automate our global delivery method and facilitate the use by our Centers of a common process and toolkit to deliver predictable, consistent, high quality, and repeatable solutions,” explained Garry Gomersall, Global IBM Alliance Leader, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. “Using the Rational tools, we have experienced a 30 percent productivity improvement on even the most complex projects. We anticipate further improvement as the technology continues to evolve.”

“The measure of the CGE&Y-IBM relationship can be seen in the results we have delivered for our joint clients. We have senior executive leadership from both of our companies actively involved in ensuring mutual success in client projects. We've trained thousands of CGE&Y consultants to enable successful implementation of IBM technology. We have strong success stories to prove that the value delivered by our relationship is real and that the results are deserving of special recognition,” noted Tim McChristian, General Manager of the IBM Computer Services Industry, the group that manages the CGE&Y business partner relationship.