| | 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 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,” 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
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
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.
| |
|
Previous Page 