| | By Mick James
One of the key
benefits of consultancy
is that it frees the
client from having to
maintain an expensive
in-house resource to
deal with short-term
issues. You’re not just
paying for the
consultants to solve
your problems, you’re
paying for them to go
away afterwards.
But this just shifts
the resource issue to
the industry, which in
the past has been
compelled to acquire
huge “pyramids” of
consultancy and
implementation staff,
with all the attendant
problems of acquiring,
maintaining and finding
work for them.
One solution is for
consultancy to become
more virtual, and no-one
has taken this trend
further than
recently-launched
Eurobase Consultancy.
Look at it from one
angle and it is a full
service IT consultancy
with over 60,000
technology professionals
and 200 project
managers; look the other
way, and there’s pretty
much nobody there at
all.
Eurobase has achieved
this by building a
consultancy offering by
redeploying resources
from its three
pre-existing business
lines.
The core of
Eurobase’s business is | |
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| | software development and
it has built a solid
reputation as a supplier
of products to the
banking and insurance
industry. Complementing
that is a managed
services line of
business which offers
things like
infrastructure
maintenance, remote
support, help desk and
legacy application
support, mainly for
London-based clients.
But it’s the addition of
Eurobase’s recruitment
arm that head of
consultancy Richard West
believes will be the key
to the success of its
consultancy offering and
which distinguishes it
from its rivals.
“The recruitment
division was set up to
feed the banking and
insurance divisions, but
has grown in its own
right to cover all
services and all
technologies,” he says.
The division continues
to expand, with new
branches opening both
here and overseas, but
Eurobase believes that
there is also an
opportunity to create
something unique by
combining this resource
with its own in-house
skills.
“We decided that as
the market was
relatively buoyant we
could take those skills
and expertise, combine
them with our management
controls and take that
out to other markets,” | |
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| | he says. “In our
insurance division for
example, we already have
project support, a
project management
office, controls
procedures – we can take
that and apply it to
build bespoke products.
The other half of the
story is this huge
resource with all the
skills you can think of:
we can put together a
team of people to do
almost anything.”
While Eurobase
Consultancy was set up
as a legal entity three
years ago, it’s only in
the last six to nine
months that it has moved
beyond the concept
stage.
“I moved across from
the insurance division,”
says West. “It’s sort of
a virtual set up – I’m
the only person in there
but I have the freedom
to call on anybody in
the group.”
While Eurobase's pool
of people could
theoretically take on
almost any project, West
believes that the
initial focus will be on
software development.
“When we visit a
prospect and look at
current IT setup we
believe that we can
build IT software faster
than they could in-house
or by outsourcing to a
big consultancy firm,”
he says. “We very much
don’t outsource overseas
– we look to do
everything in the UK and
we think we can create a | |
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| | cost-effective solution
in most situations.”
While the objective
is for Eurobase to
operate as a generic IT
consultancy, West says
that the initial
opportunities have
centred around bespoke
development for
insurance and banking
clients.
“That’s potentially
the richest source in
short term,” he says.
“As a result of that,
we’ve also stumbled
across a lot of
recruitment
opportunities, although
the consultancy has been
the ‘door opener’.”
One thing West is
eager to stress is that
Eurobase is not taking
on the big
consultancies, which in
any case form a large
part of the client base
of its recruitment
division.
“We’re not going to
bite the hand that feeds
us on the recruitment
side,” he says. “We’re a
preferred supplier to
many of the big
consultancy firms and
we’re clearly not going
to compete with them –
we operate under their
radar, and we perceive
there are plenty of
small-medium sized
clients to work with.
We’re in direct
competition with smaller
niche consultancies, but
unlike us they don’t
have the recruitment and
software bit combined.”
While its existing | |
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| | sectors can keep
Eurobase busy for some
time, the company is
already looking at the
next step. One obvious
target is to take the
e-commerce expertise it
has gained in insurance
and banking and apply it
to the retail clients.
One obvious gap in
Eurobase’s set-up is a
front end of consultants
operating in “pre-sales
mode”, but although West
doesn’t preclude
recruiting his own
consultants at some
stage in the future he
is happy with the
current set-up.
“We’re very much
solution-oriented rather
than strategy-oriented,”
he says. “What we would
like to do is partner
with the right kind of
management consultancy
–one that is good at
going out and finding
the strategy for their
client but doesn’t have
the resources to deliver
it.”
It will be very
interesting to watch
Eurobase’s development,
particularly to see how
it manages to grow
outside its “home”
sectors of insurance and
banking – partnership
may well be the key to
this. Certainly it’s a
novel approach, and a
story that we will
definitely return to in
future.
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