InfoWave, the JSE-listed software development and remote services provider, has been awarded a rolling 12-month contract for the provision of Oracle database administration services, Linux and Unix specialist skills, operating system support, technical consulting and disaster recovery for the Rewards Company.

The Rewards Company develops and administers loyalty programmes for a range of corporate businesses, including Absa, Old Mutual, Eskom and Vodacom. InfoWave has supported the Rewards Company’s critical production database since 2000, and the company’s underlying Linux operating system since 2005. The company provides a database administration resource on-site on a weekly basis to provide consulting to the Rewards Company development team in addition to the remote services.

Before putting the contract out to tender, the Rewards Company conducted a survey in advance of a request for proposal to benchmark service levels in the market. “The key criteria we used to evaluate the proposals covered the quality of the vendor’s response, financial stability, the expertise behind each vendor’s service offering, and price,” says Sajit Kalidas, head of development at the Rewards Company.
“Equally important considerations were the vendor’s knowledge of our systems, compatibility with our company going forward, and alignment with the strict security requirements in our business.” Sajit says while the existing relationship with the Rewards Company and the resulting minimal disruption to business scored positively in InfoWave’s favour, the company scored highly in all areas.

InfoWave has been integral to the ongoing development and deployment of the Rewards Company’s systems, including the implementation and support of a disaster recovery environment to ensure zero data loss and minimal downtime, deployment and support of various Web interfaces, and migration of the company’s database environment from Solaris on Sun servers to Linux, thereby lowering hardware costs and increasing return on investment. It also developed and deployed the Linux-based batch environment to facilitate the transfer of loyalty data to and from the Rewards Company’s partners.

“That we reflected so positively in the benchmarking survey is very positive for us – it shows that services can be provided remotely just as effectively as on site, and are more cost-effective,” says Bruno Lionnet, technical director at InfoWave.“We’re delighted to be the chosen service provider and partner of choice going forward to support the Rewards Company in its growth phase.”

Contact

Cindy von Pannier, InfoWave, (031) 508 1800, cindy@infowave.co.za