Empired/Oakton partnership scores golden payday with Barrick

Australian IT services company Empired has teamed up with compatriot enterprise IT consultancy Oakton to land a two-year contract with ongoing annual options to provide Barrick Gold APAC's accountancy operations with a fully managed Oracle-based solution.

The core accounting system will be delivered over Empired's FlexScale cloud, with the company providing all infrastructure and cloud management service, such as security, processing and storage systems. The system will make use of Empired's facilities on either side of Australia, with real-time replication between the east and west coast facilities.

Oakton will act as the service integrator and provide the application managed services from Oracle's ebusiness suite.

"I am delighted with the outcome of our rigorous tender process. The Empired/Oakton combination presented a unique best-of-breed mix from two complementary Australian industry leaders working together to provide a world-class solution," said Bernard Menage, Barrick's Asia-Pacific CIO.

Barrick is a Canadian-headquartered company that is the world's largest gold mining company, and operates 26 mines across the world. It has reserves in silver and copper as well as gold.

Oakton has got a taste for partnerships recently, with the company announcing last month that it is teaming up with Dimension Data to attract enterprise and government customers.

"For Oakton, it expands our value proposition in that we can now provide a more complete solution from strategy through to implementation and ongoing managed services, right across the solution stack," Oakton CEO Neil Wilson said at the time.