Warburg Pincus, the private equity firm established more than 40 years ago and which has invested more than $35 billion in over 650 companies in more than 30 countries around the world, has purchased InterAction for Smartphone™ by Calvis. The firm will be using the solution developed by Calvis to enable its fee earners and mobile workers to conveniently access client, prospect, portfolio and transaction intelligence stored within LexisNexis InterAction via their Smartphones while out of the office.
Smartphones like BlackBerry and iPhone have become increasingly integral to executives ‘on the move’ and this Calvis application capitalises on this. By making InterAction intelligence available on Smartphones firms benefit from increased productivity; shortened business development cycles; and higher levels of client service.
About Warburg Pincus: www.warburgpincus.com
About Calvis and InterAction for Smartphone: www.calvis.com/InterAction for SmartPhone Bowmark Capital the leading private equity firm specialising in smaller UK companies has purchased InterAction for Smartphone™ by Calvis. The firm will be using the solution developed by Calvis to enable its fee earners and mobile workers to conveniently access client, prospect, portfolio and transaction intelligence stored within LexisNexis InterAction via their Smartphones while out of the office.
Smartphones like BlackBerry and iPhone have become increasingly integral to executives ‘on the move’ and this Calvis application capitalises on this. By making InterAction intelligence available on Smartphones firms benefit from increased productivity; shortened business development cycles; and higher levels of client service.
About Bowmark: www.bowmark.com
About Calvis and InterAction for BlackBerry: www.calvis.com/InterAction for SmartPhone I-AM is a suite of integrated industry standard products and technologies brought together by Calvis to give you the best of both worlds: a best-of-breed, powerful and flexible asset management solution built with mainstream, easily implemented, supported and integrated technologies. With I-AM you get more functionality, faster, and at a lower cost than competitive solutions.
To read Chris Lees blog about this exciting new development click here Sandy Jacolow, who established and led Calvis’ US operations from its inception in 2009, will be stepping down as President on December 31st. Sandy’s time has been increasingly committed to two key clients who require a significant level of his time and focus for the foreseeable future. To ensure these clients get the very best service, Sandy is thus relinquishing his position at Calvis.
Sandy has been pivotal in establishing Calvis, Inc., the North American operating company within the Calvis group, and his commitment and dedication has seen a very successful first year. Calvis, Inc. has contributed nearly a third of the group revenue and has been able to make a positive contribution to the group P&L from the outset. This has been in no small part to Sandy’s unique combination of real estate industry and technology skills, and his vigorous approach to serving our clients.
Calvis will be building on this great start in North America and have plans to grow the US team over the next 12 months as we expand our CIO advisory and Microsoft SharePoint services in this region. Calvis will also be broadening the RealFuse product line which provides a flexible BI solution in SharePoint, and introducing a number of other real estate solutions for SharePoint, both in the North American and European markets.
For more information, please contact either Sandy Jacolow (sandy.jacolow@calvis.com) or Chris Lees (chris.lees@calvis.com). Professional services firm Calvis achieves 100% growth in the use of InterAction CRM after deploying InterAction for Smartphone to all staff: this reaches 282% growth after InterAction Dashboards are deployed. The use of InterAction, initially a domain of the marketing and business development staff only, was quickly adopted by all members of staff, including partners and senior managers.
The introduction of InterAction for Smartphone increased the use of InterAction for recording activities from close to 0 to 10 activities per month per employee in the first quarter after deployment and to 20 activities per month per employee in the second quarter. This was a very dramatic quarter on quarter growth. At the start of the third quarter the InterAction Dashboard was deployed on employee and management computers and the levels of activity (account and team member) were tracked daily and reviewed in weekly management meetings. The recording of activities in InterAction grew steadily to a peak of 31 per month per employee in the 6th quarter and decreased to 22 in the 8th quarter. The latter consequence of new people joining the firm and their initially more limited numbers of external activities. Over the period observed, the use of InterAction expanded from just the marketing and business development staff to all members of staff, including partners. Calvis has been appointed to provide Hines UK with document management and process management functionality using Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server 2007. The solution will manage Hines’s documents and emails and will provide an audit trial to assist in tax compliance.
Hines is a privately owned, international real estate firm that has provided the highest level of quality, service and value to its clients and investors for more than 50 years.
With a presence in more than 96 cities around the globe and investor relationships with many of the world's largest financial institutions, Hines has the breadth of experience, the network of expertise and the financial strength to assume complex and challenging investment, development and management projects. The company has offices in 16 countries, with regional offices in Atlanta, Chicago, Houston (U.S. headquarters), London (European headquarters), New York and San Francisco, as well as 62 other U.S. cities. The Hines portfolio of projects completed and under way consists of almost 950 properties including skyscrapers, corporate headquarters, mixed-use centers, industrial parks, medical facilities, and master-planned resort and residential communities. Currently, the firm controls assets valued at approximately $16 billion. To enhance its communication and working relationships with clients and their partners and suppliers, Churston Heard has briefed Calvis to design a collaboration site using Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server 2007. The portal is expected to go live in early 2008 and will be provisionally used by a client that owns multiple shopping centres.
As the UK’s foremost independent retail property consultant, Churston Heard has built its reputation by offering property vision and retail intelligence to its clients – investors, developers and occupiers. Owned by the company’s directors, Churston Heard combines a commitment to personal service with client satisfaction.
The company has six main divisions – High Street Agency, Investment, Professional, Shopping Centres, Out of Town and Development. It has 56 surveyors based in its central London, Hanover Square site, that co-ordinate nationwide acquisition and disposal programmes. The agency works for both landlords and tenants, and has a diverse client base that includes River Island, O2, Standard Life, Legal & General, Schroders, Grosvenor, Mutual Finance and Prudential. To maximise the internal and external business benefit of its SharePoint roll out, Cushman & Wakefield has appointed Calvis to provide change management consultancy to its retail team. The consultancy includes liaison with users and the facilitation of SharePoint workshops. The long term objective is to roll out the change management programme to the rest of the UK and Europe. Calvis won the contract due to its understanding of both the real estate market and SharePoint Server 2007.
Cushman & Wakefield in EMEA has a total of 1,500 employees serving clients in more than 30 countries. Globally the firm has 11,000 professional in over 50 countries. It offers the full range of commercial property services and represents a wide range of clients, including multinational corporations, pension funds, developers, entrepreneurs, government entities, small and medium-sized companies and financial institutions. Aquila has appointed to Calvis to select and implement a software solution which combines both Document Management and Property Management functionality. Expected to go live in early 2008, the preferred solution is an integration of Trace’s Blue Box and Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Aquila is directly involved in commercial and residential property development and investment across the UK. Its direct development programme is worth over £200m in terms of end investment value. Commercial projects include a wide range of new-build and refurbishment schemes in all sectors across the south east as part of the UK. It also undertakes residential development projects and large mixed-use schemes including retail and leisure. The Group’s direct investment portfolio is worth over £150m. Investment properties within its rapidly expanding portfolio include offices, industrial, warehousing, edge-of-centre and high street retail. It also undertakes work through joint ventures and advisory roles. Calvis, a leading IT and management consultancy for the professional services sector, has signed a partnership agreement with Perot Systems, a global provider of IT services and business solutions. The alliance provides Calvis with access to a development resource which will further enhance its ability to design and roll out Microsoft solutions, primarily Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Working alongside Perot, Calvis will continue to offer clients technical and strategic consultancy, based on its industry knowledge, and high level architectural design insight. Recently, Calvis has undertaken SharePoint assignments for Hines, Cushman & Wakefield and Eversheds.
Since Calvis took the strategic decision to concentrate on the provision of Microsoft technologies earlier this year, it has made significant inroads in terms of building up its SharePoint client base. To fulfil demand and maintain growth, Calvis required a development partner who could supply both onshore and offshore resources and understood the dynamics of the professional services sector.
Chris Lees, executive director at Calvis, explained: “Our business model is simple; we work with partners to provide our clients with skilled, experienced and cost effective project teams. We do not believe that consultancies can justify maintaining in-house software teams that may be a jack of all trades but a master of none. Due to our architectural design skills and sector experience we can rapidly absorb, evaluate and rationalize a specific business requirement. Now, through our partnership with Perot, we are in a position whereby we can scale-up very quickly and turn that requirement into a robust, high quality solution.”
In relation to the business and process improvement capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint, Calvis specializes in document management and workflow, business intelligence, integration and extranet and intranet solutions. The new extranet will be implemented by Calvis to provide a framework of common structures supporting many application types and vertical-based solutions, including the standard extranet applications for deal rooms, cases and projects. Due to the flexibility and scalability of the technology, Eversheds will in the future be able to introduce enhancements and upgrades quickly and cost effectively.
The SharePoint platform will improve the level of service that the Eversheds extranet offers to existing and new clients, while providing greater collaborative capabilities and a unified user interface for both internal and external users. As the solution is based on Microsoft technology and staff will be familiar with the ‘look and feel’, the internal time spent on administrative tasks is expected to be drastically reduced.
Chris Lees, Executive Director at Calvis, said: “One of our key differentiators is that we understand both technology and business. Many implementations fail because consultants don’t fully understand the exact requirement of a client or do not engage properly with stakeholders, the end result is frustration and wasted investment.
"Our ethos is very much geared to managing transition and working closely with internal project teams. This is a developmental approach that recognizes that people are more important than technology. We only recently announced our realignment to focus on SharePoint consultancy, so the fact that we are already working with a market leader like Eversheds really does justify our decision to change direction.” GL Hearn, a leading UK property consultancy, has appointed Calvis to manage and review its IT operations and deliver strategic recommendations at a boardroom level.
Calvis’ role at GL Hearn will include assessing the current relationship GL Hearn has with its IT outsourced company to determine how performance levels could be improved; analyzing whether IT is in line with the strategic objectives of the organization and is supporting business units; attending and providing insight and recommendations at board and strategic meetings; and delivering ad hoc consultancy services to support specific business initiatives.
In addition, as part of the ongoing performance assessment of the IT outsourced company, Calvis will review the terms and conditions of the contract to assess whether internal expectations are being met and are justified. In practice, this will involve a review of GL Hearn’s IT infrastructure to measure what progress has been made; an evaluation of various documents including a business needs analysis and an email system report; a review of training needs; and a comprehensive appraisal of GL Hearn’s approach to business continuity and disaster recovery.
Brian Sloggett, Managing Director at GL Hearn, said: “We have worked with Calvis before and recognize that it has a very good understanding of how the property sector operates. From our perspective, this industry knowledge is invaluable as we were not just looking for an expert in technology. We needed to partner with a company that we could trust and who could take a seat at our boardroom table and tell us pointedly what we are doing well and, where necessary, what we are doing wrong and how to rectify these situations. It’s imperative that our investment in technology supports the needs of our various business units. In a sense, this is the key to the Calvis engagement. We needed a conduit between IT and business. The Calvis proposition fulfils this requirement.”
The Technology Management service offered by Calvis is based on the company’s wide national and international experience in the real estate sector. It includes delivering high level strategic advice, solution procurement, supplier management, interim IT management and overall project management for business initiatives. The firm will be using the solution, developed in-house by Calvis, to enable its fee earners and mobile workers to conveniently access client and prospect intelligence stored within LexisNexis InterAction via their BlackBerry smartphones while out of the office.
Calvis developed the application as a result of firms’ growing dependency on BlackBerry smartphones. The handsets are becoming increasingly integral to the way in which professionals communicate with clients and contacts while ‘on the move’. However, the bulk of a firm’s client data resides in InterAction, much of which is not accessible via a BlackBerry device. Now that this information can be accessed via the Calvis application, firms will benefit from increased productivity; shortened business development cycles; and higher levels of client service.
The Calvis solution specifically allows users to:
- search their firm's entire contact list;
- find all the people their colleagues know at any given organization;
- view contact details including activities and add useful contacts to My Contacts list;
- use one click-dial or one-click email from the returned contact; and
- save time by adding activities on the way back to the office.
The Calvis solution uses a network user name and password to prevent unauthorized access and all data is transferred via the secure BlackBerry Mobile Data Service to ensure contact data remains safe. Installation is straightforward and is completed in less than a day. During deployment, existing infrastructure and security configurations do not need to be changed. The application can be used on any mobile phone network. Maciek has extensive knowledge of the legal, real estate, private equity and banking and investment sectors and has been given the remit to spearhead the company’s sales strategy for its SharePoint business solutions, primarily document management, intranet and extranet and business intelligence. He will also be tasked with winning clients for Calvis’s vendor selection, technology management and InterAction for BlackBerry propositions. Most recently, he was at LexisNexis where he successfully developed its financial sector European sales practice for InterAction CRM, wining flagship accounts and overachieving revenue targets.
Chris Lees, executive director at Calvis, said: “We have brought Maciek onboard not only to open doors for us in new sectors, but also to maintain our presence in markets where we have been traditionally very strong. Feedback from clients and prospects leads us to believe that our offering is compelling and provides firms with the opportunity to increase operational efficiencies at a time when saving money is possibly the number one priority on the boardroom agenda. As a consultancy we always try to be proactive; Maciek’s business focused approach, and his experience and education in what makes a company really work, will make it easier for our clients to crystallize their strategies and will ultimately help us maintain our prominent position in the field of IT and business consulting.” Calvis has appointed Laurence Traboulsi as a managing consultant. Laurence will be tasked with project managing new and existing business for Calvis’s SharePoint, Vendor Selection and Technology Management Services (TMS) propositions.
Most recently, Laurence held a project manager position at Eversheds where he was most notably involved with replacing the existing company-wide extranet with a SharePoint solution and building infrastructure to host internet based applications. He has previously held similar positions at Legal & General and Ericsson. Laurence’s industry experience will be used to fine tune Calvis’s agile approach to delivering complex client requirements on time and to budget; the consultancy’s philosophy is to evaluate a project as it develops resulting in faster and more accurate decision making.
Chris Lees, executive director at Calvis, said: “At Calvis we have been using an agile approach to project management for a number of years and are renowned for reacting quickly to issues and finding solutions that work without losing time. We don’t tend to work with functional specifications, but aim higher and look to encourage strategic dialogue around business and revenue objectives. By bringing Laurence into the team our capacity to have those board level conversations has increased. He has worked with some of the biggest brands in the professional services sector and is therefore well aware of the business and technology challenges these companies face. He is a welcome addition.”
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