NouvEON Hires Former Oracle Director of Sales

NouvEON announced today the appointment of Steve DeSutter as director of sales. He begins with NouvEON on Feb. 23.

DeSutter brings a strong and unique combination of leadership, management and sales capital experience to NouvEON at a time when the firm is experiencing rapid growth. For the past four years, he has served as the director of North America strategic accounts for Oracle Corp. In this role, DeSutter was a member of the executive management team, delivered revenue, software integration development alternatives, and marketing leverage through high-level sales and alliance partnerships. In addition to his leadership role at Oracle, he was responsible for executing complex enterprise deal strategies and coaching executive sales and alliance teams.
In his new role at NouvEON, DeSutter will further position the company to meet future goals.

He will be an integral part of the senior leadership team, and will be responsible for providing leadership in sales, coaching the sales team and standardizing sales processes.

"This was not an easy role to fill," says President and CEO of NouvEON, T.J. Eberle. "Our requirements were tough in a market where outstanding, successful candidates in sales leadership roles seemed to be a needle in a haystack. I am delighted with the choice we made. Steve is an important addition to our team."

DeSutter has more than 27 years of experience in leadership roles within national and global organizations including Apple Inc., Global Logistics Technologies and Enovia Corp. He began his career in 1982 with Apple Inc. While at Apple Inc., he led the company's successful penetration of UNIX into the enterprise telecommunications market. Desutter also has strong international experience. He served as international sales director for Enovia Corp., where he worked across Europe and the U.S. to lead Enovia's sales initiatives. DeSutter has also been a part of several start-ups where he led sales force hiring and development.
"This is a fantastic opportunity to join a high growth consulting company," says DeSutter. "It is my goal to help NouvEON continue rapid growth and expansion."
DeSutter received his undergraduate degree in industrial engineering from the University of South Florida.

About NouvEON
NouvEON is a regional business and technology consulting firm that specializes in managing and delivering high-value solutions to mid-market and Fortune 1000 companies throughout the Southeast. Headquartered in Charlotte, NC, NouvEON represents a "New Era" in consulting services. In this "New Era", NouvEON provides an excellent Cost to Quality ratio by combining its proprietary LIFT™ model (Local accountability, Industry knowledge, Flexible delivery and Technology Business Solutions) with its Employee Owned Network (EON™) of experienced and highly qualified business professionals. The result: NouvEON value-efficient models have resulted in a 100% referenceable client base.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com

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Standard Life picks Oracle for ID and access management

Investement aims to standardise processes and cut costs world wide. Standard Life will implement Oracle Identity and Access Management software to control customer and business partner access to its sites.

The insurance and pensions firm said that using a common platform globally, to regulate access and improve security for those accessing its websites, would also help cut costs and centralise administration around access.

The system will share data with other Standard Life systems including Microsoft Active Directory, Novell e-Directory, Oracle Database and Oracle Internet Directory.

Standard Life has developed a service oriented architecture environment , which the company has said saved £16 million in development costs in three years.

The UK operations will roll out the identity management system after the first installation is completed, in Canada.

Brian Barbour, chief information security officer at the company, said customers had “a right to expect their information to be safeguarded by the companies they choose to do business with.”

Source: Leo King @ Computerworld UK

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Virgin Blue grounds Oracle outsourcing

Virgin Blue has grounded plans to outsource the maintenance of its Oracle e-business systems, chief information officer David Harvey said late yesterday.

After indicating last year it would outsource the management of its Oracle e-business systems, infrastructure and IT help desk, Harvey yesterday told ZDNet.com.au that the Oracle component had been "put on the back burner".

The decision not to outsource that component was a response to new labour market conditions; a year ago it was difficult to retain and recruit Oracle e-Business experts in Brisbane, however that has since changed, said Harvey.

"As it turned out, the employment market has subsequently tightened and we have been fortunate to retain and indeed build on our in-house expertise, which reduced the immediate driver to seek a long-term managed services partner," he said.

News of the decision might have come as a disappointment for Western Australian-based IT services outfit ASG, which early last year trumpeted its nomination as Virgin Blue's preferred partner for Oracle services.

Virgin Blue has, however, forged ahead with its broader outsourcing strategy, following in the footsteps of its competitor Qantas, which outsourced maintenance of key systems to Satyam, Tata Consultancy Services and ASG in 2006.

Global telco Verizon Business inked a three-year deal with Virgin Blue at the end of last year covering the airline's server infrastructure.

"Last week we transitioned a number of servers hosting production systems for our new V Australia airline into Verizon's remote management control," said Harvey. "Over the next month a number of production servers running enterprise systems for the Virgin Blue group will be transitioned to Verizon."

Should the airline decide later to outsource its Oracle systems, Harvey pointed out that Verizon did have capabilities in application management also.

Virgin had also recently struck a deal with Brisbane-based IT services outfit Corpnet, which will see the two share "first level" around-the-clock IT support to all business units, according to Harvey. "This shared partnership is in its early days, but the intention is for VB to increasingly leverage Corpnet's growing scale in the IT help-desk area," he said.

Virgin Blue is also gearing up for a major business transformation project, known internally as Next Gen. A key component of the project will be the replacement of its reservation system. Contracts are expected to be signed in the coming weeks with software vendor Navitair for its New Skies reservation system.

The broader transformation project will be headed up by former general manager of Virgin Blue's ground operations, Andrew Lillyman.

The new reservation system will be different to that selected for the company's recently launched trans-Pacific V Australia service, which inherited the Amadeus system that is used for its short-haul Pacific Blue service.

Harvey said Virgin Blue's recent decision to axe 400 jobs would be unlikely to affect the technology team, which today consisted of around 160 staff — 130 permanent and 30 contractors — down 40 on last year.

"With V Australia going live, and completing that work, we've reduced the number of contractors we have," he said.

"We have been deliberately not been replacing staff over a number of months. In parallel we are cranking up a huge new reservations project and a lot of staff will be working on that for the next 12 months."

Author: Liam Tung @ ZDNet.com.au

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