Alphawest’s signs first Saffron customer in Australia

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 24 March 2009 16:32

IT Industry - Deals

Optus owned Alphawest, a national provider of ICT services, has snared the first order in Australia for its Saffron rich web browser interface for HP TRIM, an electronic records management system, securing a contract with Deakin University in Victoria.

Announcing the contract, Alphawest said Saffron is part of the company’s investment in a portfolio of value added solutions for the wider information management market, with the suite designed to improve user adoption and acceptance from large to small deployments.  It also includes integrations and interfaces for a broad range of commonly used Windows and portal interfaces, for both business and technical users.
  
Saffron, based on Web 2.0 technologies and was developed by Malaysian-based distributor VersaPAC.

Deakin University, with more than 32,000 students at campuses in Melbourne, Geelong and Warrnambool, began a trial of Saffron in December 2008, with help and support from Alphawest, initially on a Windows platform only.

However, Alphawest’s general manager Stephen Wood, says that as the system was being rolled out for records and document management in support of the university’s critical information management requirements, it became apparent that a number of departments were standardised on Mac operating systems for which there was no support.

Wood said that, in addition, Deakin had a requirement for remote web based access to all the features of TRIM, and this led Alphawest to recommend that the university trial Saffron, a rich web based application that is platform independent and runs across Windows, Apple and LINUX.

According to Wood, the suite is designed to improve user adoption and acceptance from large to small deployments and includes integrations and interfaces for a broad range of commonly used Windows and portal interfaces, for both business and technical users.
 
Project Manager ITSD at Deakin University, Martin Brandwyk, said that in the initial trials Saffron performed extremely well and provided all the functionality the university required for browser access into TRIM including Mac.
 
Wood said Alphawest had more than 250 TRIM customers in Australia and would continue to invest significantly in the area of electronic document and records management and develop services and managed solutions to help its customers achieve more from their existing investment.
 
He said Alphawest is showcasing Saffron, amongst its portfolio of information and process management solutions at the HP TRIM user forum being staged in Coolum, Queensland, starting today and continuing until Thursday.