Credit: Deamstime
Award-winning Australian IBM partner Cortell is opening offices in Auckland and Wellington to chase new business and serve trans-Tasman customers.
The new unit, which will trade as CorPlan, is an exclusive IBM partner, focusing on the company's Cognos, Planning and Analytics powered by TM1, SPSS and Watson (AI and machine learning) lines of business.
The focus on the New Zealand market is an extension of Cortell's Australian business, which has a number of customers on both sides of the Tasman.
"We are excited with our next phase of growth which has been planned for extensively," Cortell director Matthew Hill said.
The change of name for the local company was to minimise confusion and to spell out what the company was delivering in corporate planning, Hill told Reseller News.
The roll-out in New Zealand will start with the imminent appointment of two local business development managers, one in Auckland and one in Wellington, as well as a services director to manage delivery to customers.
Hill, who hails from New Plymouth, said the company aimed to have 10 to 15 staff locally by the end of the year, complemented by 60 more in Australia.
"We're investing in the NZ market, hiring local talent and training and developing local talent," Hill said.
As well as core services and solution design, CorPlan will offer training services to ensure clients have the skills they need to make the most of their systems and 24x7 support, Hill said.
Director Nick Potts said New Zealand has long been a leader in the use of technology with business striving to achieve value and optimise performance.
"That inherent desire to look at performance improvement will combine well with our best practice and market leading solutions to achieve the outcomes needed to make those steps."
Last year, Cortell collected two awards during the IBM PartnerWorld conference in San Francisco.
The company picked up a SaaS (software-as-a-service) Excellence award as well as the Global Business Partner award for planning analytics.
Hill started the company in early 2001 and was later joined by Potts.
Cortell, which has around 60 staff, has locations across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra, servicing more than 400 clients.
The group also specialises in finance, having developed out-of-the-box regulatory reporting applications and a budgeting, forecasting and planning solution for mid-market and enterprise organisations.
The company said it also sees an opportunity to support organisations wanting to transition from manual, error-prone planning processes to agile solutions that incorporate machine learning and predictive forecasting.
