SPIRIT 21
SPIRIT/21: Delivering Value-added Services with IBM

Today’s highly competitive environment and increasing requirements for service quality by customers has compelled enterprises to take measures that enable a holistic and systematic approach towards their businesses. “In such a scenario, CIOs need to manage cost, maintain stability, and drive innovation to optimize their business processes,” begins Markus Sieber, Chairman of the Board, SPIRIT/21. The Zurich, Switzerland-based SPIRIT/21, is a firm and an IBM partner that enables its customers to identify emerging fields and topics and delivers them value-added services accordingly. “Our view of IBM is strongly influenced by its global technology services business,” he adds. As a long-term IBM Core Supplier, the firm works in tandem with departments and management at the different levels of the IT giant and also possesses an in-depth understanding of its business processes and strategies.

SPIRIT/21 takes care of the IBM non-strategic topics or those which are difficult to move or translocate including the operational responsibility. “Our solution based developments and tools add value to the IBM projects that cannot be shifted to the global delivery center owing to financial and regulatory restrictions,” states Sieber. The company is deft in offering broad and innovative service portfolio and can take over the entire or part of the responsible project implementation. In addition, SPIRIT/21 provides an appropriate contractual constellation with the help of its 360°-Sourcing Model.

Being an expert in the collaboration environment, the firm’s specialists are familiar with different systems that are available in the market and assist customers for an integrated collaboration environment such as “IBM Connections”. This ensures that the customers’ workforce can easily carry out their work processes even during the transition period. “We procedurally support our customers with our experience from other change programs,” says Andreas Weiss, Managing Director, E-Business Operation, SPIRIT/21.

The company leverages on its experience from a variety of projects on Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino and helps customers optimize their existing platform by offering them a future-proof architecture, development of support or operational models as well as training, support, and documentation.

Our solution based developments and tools add value to IBM projects that cannot be shifted to the global delivery center

SPIRIT/21 is geared up to serve the needs of today’s IT environment and focus on cloud solutions for the data center of tomorrow. Through these new technologies, SPIRIT/21 embraces real-time data to achieve transparency and positively influence customer satisfaction. This results in reduction of error rates, significantly less risk transformation, and elimination of external dependencies by standard solutions. “Our higher flexibility, better reliability, and a quicker support for business inquiries sets us ahead of our competition,” says Sieber emphasizing the company’s skills in new technologies and innovative self-developed tools and solutions. The firm not only engages thoroughly in the solution implementation processes at the technological level but also during the preparation and training of the clients’ workforce with respect to the change in their business processes and technologies.

“As a partner of IBM Switzerland we acquired the engineering responsibility for the issue of storage as well as the subject of the Unix platform AIX through the acquisition of operating responsibility and integration of employees into SPIRIT/21,” says Sieber. In a classic outsourcing contract SPIRIT/21 offered this service as a managed service and experienced a decrease in the costs for IBM over a period of four years.

SPIRIT/21 plans to forge ahead carrying its goal to inspire its customers to think different in the IT world of tomorrow and drive in this change successfully.