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Inoapps keeps on growing

Hi-Tech Scotland reporter | Tuesday November 11, 2008



Andy Bird, Managing Director of Inoapps, is in confident mood – and with good reason.

Last month, the Aberdeen-founded Oracle consultants captured a coveted Gold Partner of their Year award for ‘Project Management and Product Delivery’ at the annual awards of the UK Oracle User Group. Inoapps also received Bronze awards in two other categories - Training Partner of the Year and Small Business Partner of the Year.

“Consultancy is very much a people business,” said Bird. “To be presented with these awards highlights the dedication and quality of our team and, also, the strength of our core services.

 “Since its formation in 2006, Inoapps has grown rapidly year-on-year and we fully expect that growth to continue in 2009. While no business can claim to be ‘recession-proof’, I think we’re fortunate in the respect that our focus has always been on helping businesses to reduce their overheads and improve their processes. The threat of recession actually heightens the importance of our message and increases the value of our core services. We’re offering exactly the type of help that most organisations will need over the next couple of years.”

Inoapps provides the complete range of Oracle services including E-Business Suite consultancy, bespoke deployment, certified training, managed support and hosting services. Although building its excellent reputation in the oil and gas sector, Inoapps has expanded into other industries, including manufacturing, utilities and the public sector. Despite being a relatively young company, Inoapps has been tenacious in growing the local market for its full range of services and has already won significant contracts from blue chip customers in the face of fierce competition from global IT players.

Phil Wilson, Consultancy Director, said: “The Inoapps consulting team has an average of five years experience working with Oracle solutions, ensuring they have all the skills and knowledge needed to deliver projects on time and within budget. We currently have around 45 staff and are still actively recruiting. We now operate offices in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Stafford and plan to open a London office within the next few months.

“Our aim is the correct solution every time by combining and managing all the elements of the project and managing them as a single project with client accountability at all levels. Projects are resourced from Inoapps four distinct business divisions enabling the correct level of focus and specialism required for each of our clients.”

Ian Heathcock, Business Development Manager at Inoapps, believes the economic downturn is leading many businesses to consider new approaches to their ICT systems. He said: “A key message for business at the moment is that it’s possible to ‘sweat’ the technology assets you already have, without having to get into the ‘rip and replace’ of whole systems just to get a few extra bits of functionality. With our consulting team, we can come in, understand what it is that your business is trying to achieve and then develop and add-on to an existing package solution in a way that adds that extra value. Obviously, the time and cost savings of this approach are quite dramatic compared to a full ‘rip and replace’ of a package solution.”

Accelerating business

The primary enabler for Inoapps’ client solutions is Oracle software where E-Business Suite, Applications Express and SOA Suite are the key components.  
Oracle E-Business Suite is a group of fully integrated enterprise applications, consisting of industry leading CRM, ERP and SCM tools. With the most complete Business Intelligence portfolio, E-Business Suite provides clients with a 360 degree view of their business. This enables faster, more accurate decision-making based on consistent, up-to-the-minute financial and operational information and gives every employee access to the relevant, complete information required for their role.
Andy Bird said: “There’s growing interest in the marketplace around Business Intelligence reporting, which allows you to draw on data from disparate systems, bring them together and amalgamate them to give you a better picture of your business. Where is your expenditure going? How is your revenue coming in? Where can we tighten out belts? The right Business Intelligence solution gives you the power to answer all those questions and respond accordingly.”

One Inoapps customer to benefit from this approach is Cairn Energy PLC (Cairn), an Edinburgh-based oil and gas exploration and production company whose activities are primarily focused on South Asia, Tunisia and Greenland. The company’s data was previously held in a number of separate systems, which meant that there were instances of data duplication. Inoapps implemented a solution for Cairn based on Oracle E-Business Suite, using the Finance, Projects, EAM, HR, Procurement and SCM modules. This solution was delivered within a fully hosted and supported environment, which meant that Cairn Energy did not need to deploy any additional technology infrastructure – it was entirely managed by Inoapps. This was vital, because the solution had to be accessible from remote locations via a simple internet connection.

Based on their success with Cairn Energy and other players in the global oil and gas sector, Inoapps has invested its time and experience in the development of an industry-specific Oracle Accelerate solution.

Oracle Accelerate delivers a complete set of applications, rapid implementation tools and expertise, so businesses can maximize budgets and achieve real business value quickly. Inoapps Oil and Gas Accelerator provides a fixed scope approach to implementation with agile real time framework for delivering relevant information to discussion makers when they need it.

Andy Bird said: “Inoapps ‘Oil and Gas Accelerate’ solution includes industry best practices and focuses on supporting business flows. Business flows enable the customer to relate their business requirements to the Oracle E-Business Suite solution functionality. The key business processes enabled include Projects, Finance, Management Reporting and Supply Chain Management.”

Inoapps comprehensive range of services means that it can also offer dedicated Oracle Applications hosting, along with associated managed services. With a fully hosted solution, the servers, database and applications are entirely managed by skilled Inoapps professionals, and helpdesk support is also provided. Remote management options are available for clients that wish to keep their data and servers on their own premises.

Turning the tide

Inoapps experienced another exciting milestone earlier this year with the acquisition of Edinburgh-based Indigo Tide.

“We had been attempting to grow our technology and training divisions organically, but after working with Indigo Tide on a number of projects, we felt there was great synergy between our teams and the acquisition became a logical move for us,” said Andy Bird. “The acquisition gives us the ability to provide more rounded solutions and enhance our ability to provide development and training within new areas of technology."

During the last 6 months the reputation of Inoapps’ training division has been further enhanced with its appointment by Oracle as their training and delivery partner for Scotland. This appointment expands Oracle University and demonstrates the commitment to delivering a larger and more diverse selection of courses.

Dave Easton, Head of Inoapps’ training division commented: “The appointment of Inoapps enables Oracle University to provide a ‘Local’ service to the Scottish market and endorses Oracle’s commitment to their customer base. Our trainers have many years of training and consultancy experience and add ‘real world’ context to the training provided.”

It would seem that Andy Bird’s confidence is well founded when he says: “All in all, 2008 has been a fantastic year for Inoapps and, despite the gloom, we strongly suspect that 2009 is going to be even better.”

 www.inoapps.com

 

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