Crimsonwing's e-business initiative, Ideal Hardware - one of the UK's leading distributors of IT products - has been very successful, with immediate and dramatic benefits. In 2001, when the project began, Ideal saw a massive 40 per cent growth in its software licensing business and now in the second quarter of this financial year have sold in excess of £40 million.
Ideal have now been short-listed as finalists in the UK's National Business Awards for the category E-Business Strategy of the Year with an application developed in Malta by Crimsonwing's e-business team.
License Desk on the Internet (LDI) is designed to enable corporate software license agreements to be sold and administered over the Web. The success of LDI has prompted DELL to outsource all their licensing to Ideal, with Ideal anticipating a doubling of their license revenue.
Two years ago, Crimsonwing focused its resources into a pioneering venture - that of providing e-business solutions. This followed a period of research and market analysis which included the testing and evaluation of different technologies.
To date their e-business group has concentrated on business-to-business, building solutions that allow companies to trade exclusively with each other via their own Websites.
To optimise its resources, Crimsonwing teamed up with a number of technological partners such as IBM. Another technological partner is one of the major suppliers of e-business software, Intershop with whom they built e-business solutions based on their new package Enfinity - an e-business platform which enabled Crimsonwing to develop corporate solutions of a substantial size.
The main technologies used in e-business development are primarily HTML, Java J2EE structure and XML, though Crimsonwing are currently investigating MS solutions and platforms.
The vast majority of work developed by Crimsonwing is project based with e-business resource varying according to the size of the project.
A project of three months duration would normally have approximately ten persons involved. So far, e-business projects embarked upon by Crimsonwing have been hugely successful.
With ongoing training in leading edge skills and technologies, Crimsonwing has built itself a reputation for quality and fit for purpose.