Saudi uni to implement BI solution

Satyam, Wipro and IBM are all being considered to deploy a business intelligence project at a leading Saudi university.

King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) is considering around eight firms for the multi-million Saudi riyal implementation contract, project manager Iftikhar Nadeem told IT Weekly, with other applicants including Tata Consultancy Services and Convansys.

The selected partner will work on implementing pre-acquired solutions from Oracle, Cognos and SAP; the implementation is slated to start at the beginning of May.

“We have scheduled presentations with the shortlisted vendors. It will take two weeks to finish the evaluations and another week for us to do the evaluations internally. So I expect [to announce the winning candidate in] two to three weeks,” Nadeem said. He declined to say which of the vendors had been shortlisted for the contract.

The implementation stage is expected to last from ten months to a year.

Nadeem said key criteria when assessing candidates will include: strength of the team, experience of doing similar projects, experience in higher education, cost, and approach and methodology.

Oracle will be used for the back end, Cognos for the front end and SAP for advanced analytics, he added.

The business intelligence implementation is part of the university’s Raed project, which involves the modernisation of the university’s ERP applications (see IT Weekly 1-7 February 2007).

KFUPM has deployed 15 modules from Oracle in total as well as an online portal from SunGard Higher Education.

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