GFI forges a partnership with LIFERAY in Belgium and Luxembourg
GFI Belux wants to become most important collaboration market actor
Leuven/Wavre/Gent/Luxembourg, 14th September 2010 – GFI, the European IT services company with a Belgian e-process solutions competence centre has entered into a partnership with Liferay, one of the market leaders in open source portal environments.
A first step in collaboration strategy
The collaboration market, invariably named by Gartner as one of the top CIO priorities for the next years, consists according to GFI –next to emerging cloud solutions- of 3 important technology suppliers: Open Source, IBM, and Microsoft. GFI Belux wants to cover the complete collaboration solution spectrum. Not only GFI’s offering will extend through the partnership with Open Source actor Liferay, but also the market position in Belgium will be reinforced.
Pascal Meyers, CEO of GFI Benelux, clarifies the choice of Liferay: “Companies today look for user-friendly and affordable collaboration platforms. Open Source software is a good alternative for commercial software. The Liferay platform has about 60 building blocks that companies can use to build a website, an intranet, or other collaborative environments. It is a perfect addition to our collaboration products and services portfolio. Moreover, we are able to leverage our international experience with this platform. GFI is among others responsible for Liferay implementations at Barclays, Orange, STX Europe, EDF, and Veolia Environmental Services”.
Open Source is a mainstream phenomenon
GFI has the ambition to become the largest specialized integrator in the collaboration market – with regard to consultancy and implementation as well as ‘running’ the platforms. In that strategy, Open Source is an important concept. Meyers does advice companies be critical before wholeheartedly committing to Open Source: “Companies have to consider the total cost of ownership, and not get fixated on the fact that Open Source is free. These contracts often have a high maintenance fee. A lot depends on how critical the application really is. GFI evaluates for each and every project all the separate building blocks to come to the most cost-efficient collaborative environment. For this process, Open Source has become an established value”.
If you would like to have more information, please contact
Tom Herbots, Marketing Manager at GFI: 016 38 11 65 or tom.herbots@gfi.be
About GFI
GFI is an information technology service provider. The originally French company is specialised in the optimisation and integration, of business processes, the integration of company solutions, and Internet solutions. GFI is present in 10 countries with about 10.000 employees. The overall revenue was 663.6 million Euros on 31/12/2009. In Belgium, GFI has about 150 employees, and offices in Haasrode-Leuven, Wavre, and Gent.
For more information: www.gfi.be
About Liferay
Liferay is a leading supplier of open source enterprise portal and collaboration software products, acknowledged by Gartner in their Magic Quadrant, and used worldwide by Fortune 500 companies such as Allianz, AutoZone, Benetton Group, Cisco Systems, Lufthansa Flight Training, the French Ministry of Defence, and the United Nations.
For more information: www.liferay.com