As a result of meeting all of IBM’s eligibility requirements, Ovations has been officially appointed as a Silver IBM Business Process Management (BPM) partner. This is only the fifth accreditation of its kind to have been given in the world and is the only one outside of the US.
An official partner of IBM since 2005, Ovations has successfully developed, customised, deployed and designed BPM solutions for a host of leading South African clients. BPM is a discipline that leverages software and services to provide total visibility into your organisation, helping you to discover, document, automate, and continuously improve business processes to increase efficiency and reduce costs.
The company’s specialist BPM team works with the feature-rich IBM BPM suite to assist clients in reaping benefits such as faster time to deployment, improved tooling and run time for process design, execution, monitoring and optimisation of business processes.
“The process of acquiring this certification was a rigorous one in which we underwent a series of interviews, and had to complete and deliver comprehensive documentation of all of our IBM BPM deployments,” states Craig Leppan, business development director at Ovations. “In short we had to demonstrate to the global IBM BPM practice that Ovations has the experience and product knowledge to really deliver on the accreditation.
“The fact that we are also the only partner outside of the Americas to obtain an IBM BPM accreditation demonstrates to customers that we have developed the right methodologies, policies and procedures to ensure the successful deployment of IBM BPM,” he adds.
Kree Govender, hybrid cloud sales lead for IBM SA, handed over the accreditation certificate at a recent event in Johannesburg. He read out a citation by IBM Worldwide CTO for Smarter Process, Jean Pommier, who had this to say about the Ovations achievement: “It is a delight seeing Ovations stand out among our implementation partners in South Africa. This is all thanks to their diligent application of IBM’s recommended guidelines for our smarter process products, in particular an agile and incremental approach. I look forward to seeing them applying the skills we accredited them with on more successful implementations with our clients, in Africa in particular.”
Govender explains that the award is made on the back of multiple implementations, a number of happy customers and with Ovations rightly challenging the status quo. “At IBM we only have a handful of BPM partners that are accredited, notably Ovations is the only BPM accredited partner outside of the Americas which is a massive achievement. To have one of our own in South Africa achieve such an accolade is truly a special moment and I am exceptionally proud to be associated with the Ovations team,” he adds.
According to Leppan, Ovations has made substantial strides to convince customers to adopt and deploy IBM’s BPM solutions and has over the past 10 years made significant investments in amassing and growing IBM-specific skills internally.
“This accreditation positions Ovations right up there with some of the very large IBM Worldwide partners and means that the potential to open doors to new markets and clients beyond the spaces we have traditionally played in is endless. IBM always says that success breeds success.
“The company is invested in the business of making the world better — envisioning a better world, building the technology to support this, delivering results, and making it work better and work smarter for the customer. It is this vision that rings true with Ovations and is certainly part of the journey we sell to our local customers,” Leppan says.