VA
Unlocking Innovation through Synergic IBM Partnerships

For Shane Britten, soon after taking up the role of CEO at VA, the first thing on his agenda was to bring about a major change: to make his company a forward-thinking, adaptive, and innovative technical solutions provider. By leveraging its partnership with IBM effectively, the Australia-based company has sought to address the big data-centric challenges that its clients face, especially in the areas of defense, law enforcement, corrections, financial, and commercial intelligence. To that end, the company has been an early endorser and an expert in delivering the IBM i2 product suite. Being backed by a technological giant like IBM has positioned VA at a superior level of technical efficacy to gain and maintain the edge of delivering robust and easy-to-use solutions to their clients.

“We have helped our clients achieve great success in fraud and crime prevention, insider threat detection, regulatory compliance, and broader investigations,” says Britten. VA provides a high level of service to their diverse client base that faces a common challenge of managing enormous amounts of data pouring in from various sources. The company’s solutions can fuse together data from multiple sources that range from databases, applications, and systems, and present analysts with one view of their data, thereby enhancing their ability to draw values and insights. From open-source information, social media sources, internal repositories, and enterprise systems, analysts can retrieve and visualize all information associated with an investigation.

When it comes to deployment, VA enables its potential clients to either make more of the IBM i2 suite, should they be using it already or can help them to setup the powerful toolset from scratch. Like Britten—who hails from a strong Australian intelligence background— most of VA’s employees comprise skilled practitioners from intelligence, law enforcement, and military domains. By offering online training courses, added recently to its portfolio under Britten’s leadership, VA goes the extra mile to ensure its expertise translates to be equally resourceful for their clientele.

In effect, VA projects itself to its clients as a nimble, ‘always-on-call solutions provider’ backed by the assurance and innovation of a world class technology leader like IBM.

We have helped our clients achieve great success in fraud and crime prevention, insider threat detection, regulatory compliance, and broader investigations

The company covers the spectrum of investigative, analytical, and intelligence challenges, from the collection of open source information, data management and processing, to the analysis of multiple information sources and provision of the human capabilities required for effective insight generation. In the light of its change in executive leadership and management, VA has also broadened its IBM solutions portfolio and tactical partnerships to expand its international footprint.

The synergic partnership of VA and IBM is an ongoing effort on both sides for joint technical training, sales enablement, and development planning, propelling each other to provide a distinctive level of innovation in the solutions that ultimately benefit the clients. Britten plans to steer the company as an all-rounder in the space, by partnering with other major tech providers in addition to IBM. The latest generation of analytical tools provided by VA, including the IBM i2 suite embraces the ongoing digital transformation and provides an efficient way for clients to engage with the technological landscape of the modern era. “We are returning to the roots of VA to ensure our training courses and professional solutions continue to be recognized around the world as the cornerstone of effective and sustained use of i2 products,” explains Britten. “We will soon roll out some exciting and groundbreaking products and services,” he hints.