Best Non-IBM Reseller Solution: SSI

SSI sales and marketing manager Kerry Glynn says taking part in the IBM Business Partner Awards is a way of gaining exposure for SSI and creating relationships with other IT companies.

By Reseller News Staff, Auckland | Friday, 30 November 2007
A collaboration with British wool supplier H Dawson helped Christchurch-based software development company Systems, Software & Instrumentation (SSI) win the Best Non-IBM Reseller Solution award.

Sales and marketing manager Kerry Glynn says as a non-IBM reseller, taking part in the awards is a way of gaining exposure for SSI and creating relationships with other IT companies.

“It also gives our clients such as H Dawson some visibility because of the solutions we provide.”
SSI developed the Global Trader System (GTS) using a Jade system and implemented it using IBM xSeries servers, to make real-time business information available to H Dawson.

SSI has been operating since 1981 and was made a Jade partner in 1998. The company provides a broad expertise in software development, producing both package and custom solutions for a wide variety of clients.
“SSI has always specialised in producing customised software at competitive prices. To achieve this, SSI has produced modules that allow easy integration and adaptation,” says Glynn.
“With Jade, SSI has been able to bring this philosophy into the Windows environment. Combine the database imbedded in Jade and scalability of implementation and you have applications suitable for a single PC to very large multi-user systems.”

One of its most well known products is the GlobalBake software system, used in food manufacturers’ processes. Glynn says that GlobalBake is now being sold in four countries.
“We appointed Successful Business Solutions earlier this year as a local distributor to ensure we were looking after New Zealand businesses as well. We recently took GlobalBake to the international baking industry conference and received a lot of interest.”

Innovative Bakery Solutions was appointed as a North American distributor for GlobalBake about two months ago. Glynn says he wants to add 10 or 20 American customers to the 10 it already has in the US during the coming year. The company was also hoping to sign up another five distributors throughout the US to pick up some of the potential 15,000 customers.

SSI has seven staff with clients in countries such as Australia, the US, Fiji and Dubai.
“We offer 20 Jade applications to 450 customers in eight countries. This gives us a good spread of customers and we are able to service them via the internet. We’ve installed solutions for people in countries where we have never been to.”
The company has customers in industries such as food manufacturing, forestry, agriculture and retail.

Technology used:
SSI’s JADE-based Global Trader System
IBM System x servers
Citrix Metaframe
SuseLinux operating system