The success of any business depends upon the quality of the decisions it makes and to achieve this goal many companies are investing in data warehousing, customer relationship management, business process management and business intelligence, but the companies are often found unhappy with the results. SDA sits in conversation with JY Pook, Managing Director of Fair Isaac Asia Pacific, to find out the necessary linkages between corporate data, business strategies and customer interactions to help financial services customers make smarter decisions and also to get an insight of IBM and Fair Isaac’s renewed Strategic Alliance. |
Q: Pook could you tell our readership about yourself and your role at Fair Isaac?
A: I am the vice president and managing director for Fair Isaac, Asia Pacific based in Singapore. Working closely with the Fair Isaac executive management team, I am responsible for leading the development and execution of Fair Isaac's strategic growth initiatives in Asia-Pacific and to expand the company’s Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) solutions in one of the world's fastest-growing consumer finance markets.
I am also responsible for establishing and growing successful relationships with the company's local clients and strategic partners, as well as leading all aspects of the company's operations and staff based in the region.
Q: IBM and Fair Isaac are renewing their strategic alliance. Could you tell us about this announcement in detail and also explain us the terms of this agreement?
A: IBM and Fair Isaac are announcing that the two companies are renewing their Strategic Alliance -- IBM's highest tier partner status. The terms of the agreement address technical enablement and joint enablement that will make it easier for our joint clients to build open standards based integrated solutions to boost performance management across the enterprise. This news is centered around a significant OEM agreement that will result in Fair Isaac building their next generation EDM (Enterprise Decision Management) suite based upon IBM's open-standards based middleware, including: DB2, WebSphere, Rational tools and Lotus software, including Portal, and the IBM System z and System p platforms. As part of the agreement, Fair Isaac will lead with IBM Global Business Services on systems integration for clients as part of its shared services delivery model.
Through this strategic alliance relationship, IBM and Fair Isaac will jointly invest in sales, marketing, services and technology to deliver strategic solutions to our customers worldwide to improve operational efficiencies, business resiliency and deep cross-enterprise information integration for improved decision support and analytics.
• The renewed IBM and Fair Isaac Strategic Alliance has a four year term where both companies will jointly build, market, sell and Fair Isaac's next generation applications that deliver information on demand to help customers make better business decisions.
• The two companies will initially collaborate around financial services with plans to expand across other industries over the course of the partnership.
• Fair Isaac is further enabling its solutions with IBM technology as their platform of choice and will enhance and optimize its products and new development on IBM's software and hardware. Fair Isaac will also deliver IBM’s WebSphere and Information Management technologies as part of the preferred reference architecture for its EDM suite for the financial services industry.
• IBM Global Business Services will deploy trained consultants for qualified Fair Isaac opportunities including account opening, customer and account management, analytics, fraud, collections and recovery, etc. based on customer requirements.
Q: Could you explain us how the businesses would be benefited with decision management applications?
A: IBM and Fair Isaac are providing customers with solutions built on open standards and SOA, which will help reduce the total cost of ownership by leveraging existing IT investments, eliminating the need to rip and replace their existing IT investments. Fair Isaac shares and tightly aligns with IBM’s Information on Demand vision, delivering information as a service, available to those who need it, when they need it.
Q: What type of customers would be benefited most from this announcement and how?
A: IBM and Fair Isaac count the top 100 global banks as clients in common. The renewed alliance and OEM agreements will focus IBM and Fair Isaac resources on provisioning new open-standards based solutions to help existing customers drive more value from existing IT assets. In addition both companies are focusing on new customer growth in emerging markets such as China, Brazil, Central and Eastern Europe and Japan where banks are scrambling to meet consumer demand for new products and services.
Q: What products and solutions within Fair Isaac and IBM does this alliance impact?
A: This news is centered around a very significant OEM agreement that will result in Fair Isaac building their next generation EDM (Enterprise Decision Management) suite based upon IBM's open-standards based middleware including DB2, WebSphere, Rational tools and Lotus software, and the IBM System z platform. Fair Isaac’s new EDM suite, which also contains the industry leading business rules engine Blaze Advisor and predictive modeling tool Model Builder, will consist of the following main applications, which we will sell jointly:
· Enterprise Originations (Capstone)
· Enterprise Customer Management (TRIAD)
· Enterprise Fraud (Falcon)
· Enterprise Collection and Recovery (Debt Manager)
Q: How in your opinion, companies would be able to increase their return on the IT investment?
A: One of the key criteria to helping customers implement an SOA-based infrastructure is providing a foundation for organizations to integrate business information across the enterprise and gain insight from this data. Customers can take advantage of solutions built on open standards to move away from project-based initiatives to flexible architectures that preserve their technology investments while increasing the availability of extracted and real-time data. As a result, companies can increase efficiencies and become more competitive by gaining real-time business insight to information, boost performance and gain a faster return on their IT investment.
Q: What are some of the issues that Fair Isaac’s solutions will help solve for the financial institutions in the region?
A: Within the region, Fair Isaac offers financial institutions comprehensive consulting, delivery and implementation support services for Fair Isaac's advanced solutions for Enterprise Decision Management (EDM). We are global leaders in risk management, fraud control and account management technology, and can help financial institutions with a full range of account originations, marketing and collections & recovery decisions.
Q: Financial services organizations are more demand driven and under pressure to coupe up with the ever-changing application and service requirements. Considering this, how promising are these open standards based solutions for such organizations?
A: By standardizing on IBM's open standards middleware and hardware, and committing to SOA, Fair Isaac is enabling customers to leverage their existing IT investments. Customers are also seeking business value, which they will get from a solution based on open standards versus a proprietary framework from other platform providers.
Q: Could you explain our readership why were these products created?
A: Fair Isaac and IBM are providing customers with new vertical industry solutions and industry expertise that will help them address their specific business challenges. By combining our solutions together, the IBM middleware capabilities extend the reach of Fair Isaac's solutions across enterprises and between enterprises, enabling clients to perform analysis that leverages all available data across the enterprise. Concurrent with the integration of the IBM technology, Fair Isaac is moving from a collection of applications to a suite of best-in-class applications that spans the entire customer lifecycle. The suite will enable customers to develop, deploy and manage more sophisticated risk and fraud management strategies across multiple products and geographies. Customers use this information from multiple data sources to gain visibility into business performance through joint solutions. These capabilities combined with IBM and Fair Isaac joint services expertise, enable clients to optimize their analytics capabilities leveraging industry-specific best practices. The integration of the applications into a suite will enable lower cost of ownership for our joint clients.
Q: How much work force would be dedicated to the joint alliance?
A: Fair Isaac and IBM are still determining this number based on client demand. Both companies are now assigning sales resources to promote the joint solutions within mutually agreed upon client opportunities through joint account planning and pursuit. In addition, both companies will also benefit from collaborative selling efforts across all of the worldwide sales teams. Fair Isaac will lead with IBM hardware, middleware, and services in its marketing and sales activities for the solution(s) unless customer requests a non-IBM platform/service. IBM Global Business Services will deploy trained consultants on the solution for qualified opportunities.
Q: How long is the duration of the partnership?
A: IBM and Fair Isaac are entering into a four-year strategic alliance that includes a significant commitment by both parties to bring long-term value to our customers.
Q: What’s the market opportunity around SOA and information on demand and the FSS Industry?
A: Analyst firm Financial Insights (an IDC company) estimates banks globally will spend USD 170 billion on technology in 2008.
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