News Release        

• New service has 6 dedicated senior technology experts with team numbers

expected to double before year-end

• Forecasting 50 customers and €3M in new revenue for service before year-end

• Enterprise Ireland is supporting growth opportunities into international markets

• New service to competitively target Gartner

14th July 2010

Origina, a leading Irish IT services company, today announced that it has launched a new enterprise audit and IT infrastructure benchmarking service which is targeted at business and government organisations in Irish and international markets.  The launch of Origina’s new service follows a small number of successful projects for the public sector in Ireland which have resulted in €4.5M cost savings.

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 new service* will see a dedicated team in Origina independently assess and benchmark client’s entire IT infrastructures and look to align them with business goals and international best practices.  It focuses on a wide range of criteria including cost, risk, efficiencies, agility and performance. 

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 license usage which were re-used to offset new license purchases.

Rowan O’Donoghue, director of innovation and development at Origina, said, “We believe our new service is particularly suitable for the Irish public sector. 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.

Origina currently has a dedicated team of six senior technology experts who will deliver the new benchmarking matrix and the team is expected to double before year-end as demand grows.  Origina forecasts 50 clients and €3M in revenue for its new service before year-end.  Enterprise Ireland is supporting the development and roll-out of Origina’s service which it believes has significant potential in international markets. 

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.

Tomás O’Leary, managing director, Origina, said, “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.  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.

- ends -

Notes to editors:

* The Origina benchmarking matrix is a fully independent end-to-end review of an organisation’s IT infrastructure which is scored against ten 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.

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About Origina

Origina is one of Ireland’s leading IT consulting, services and outsourcing companies, with more than 40 people in its Dublin and London offices.  Established in 1998, it works with government and commercial customers in Ireland, UK, mainland Europe, Caribbean and United States.  Origina’s highly certified IT professionals specialise in some of the world’s leading hardware and software platforms.  Origina’s innovative approach – Origina Thinking! - has seen it win numerous high profile awards including the 2010 European IT Excellence Award, ‘SMB Solutions Provider of the Year.’ Its core philosophy is challenging and visionary. Its homepage is http://www.origina.com/

For more information, contact:
Barry Chapman
Comit Communications & Marketing
t: +353 1 215 7671
m: + 353 86 6082031
e: bchapman@comitmarketing.com
w: http://www.comitmarketing.com/