Data#3 rolls out Office 2007, Salesforce

Diversified IT products and services company Data#3 this week said it was in the middle of a two-year internal software and systems revamp, including roll-outs of Office 2007 and Salesforce.com.

John Grant
(Credit: Data#3)

"We work on quite small growth margins and narrow margins," Data#3 managing director John Grant said. The company has around 500 staff.

The revamp, which started in the 2008 calendar year and is intended to be finished this year, has involved replacing Data#3's office suite, ERP, CRM, financial, service management, candidate management and workflow systems.

The Office 2007 roll-out has already been completed. Although Data#3 is a Microsoft reseller, Grant said that it wasn't just to set an example that the company has migrated to the newest version of Office, but because of the benefits it would bring. "We run a business," he said.

Most vendors for the rest of the revamp have been locked in, and the new systems will be going live progressively over the next year. The ERP system the company chose was from a US company called Astea and is currently going live, the CRM was from Saleforce.com, while financial and workflow systems were both from Microsoft. The company hasn't yet looked at candidate management.

The company engaged an external consultant to help choose the right products, Grant said, with no vendors receiving special treatment because of reselling agreements.

"The systems you use can make or break your business," the executive said, adding that there have been far too many companies which had screwed up their IT implementations, and that he didn't intend Data#3 to encounter the same problem.

Grant wasn't willing to say how much the revamp had cost, but said the capital expenditure of the company had been raised to accomplish what it needed to do.