Professional services monolith PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has penned an alliance with integration tools developer STC outlining several joint business development and education initiatives.
PwC joins Andersen Consulting, EDS and CSC as an STC channel partner, but Des Powell, STC's managing director of Pacific Rim Operations, claims it will take a couple of months before the agreement filters down to PwC's Australian operations.
As part of the agreement, PwC will resell and implement STC's eBusiness integration products including eGate and the eBI suite eXchange. In effect, STC provides the software "glue" holding B2B exchanges, legacy systems and enterprise business applications together.
While Andersen, EDS and CSC have taken a stake in the enterprise integration developer, it is not known at this stage whether PwC has followed suit.
STC started product development 10 years ago and Powell claims the company now boasts a substantial list of top 500 government and corporate customers such as its recent multimillion-dollar deal with Visa International to manage and distribute data across the credit card company's global customer transaction network.
Powell claims the growth of B2B, B2C and business applications like ERP, CRM, knowledge management, and legacy systems is presenting enterprise customers with the challenge of finding new products, such as STC's range, to integrate their substantial investments.
While the company maintains a direct sales force, Powell assured ARN the real opportunities for the Australian channel lie in partnering with STC on an "opportunity-by-opportunity basis". And with implementation timeframes pushing the 90-day mark, Powell claims resellers stand to benefit from discovering STC as "the best kept secret in the market".
The announcement comes at a time when STC's local operations are growing at around one person a month, Powell said, with plans to grow the company's worldwide employee base to around 800 by the end of the year.