Origo Case Study
September 2007
Origo, based at Heriot-Watt Research Park North near Riccarton, west of Edinburgh, was formed in 1989 by sixteen leading life assurance companies to facilitate the development of electronic trading in the UK Life, Pensions and Collective Investment market. The business and technical standards that they develop and maintain make it possible for Financial Services companies to exchange data with their partners electronically in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
Origo’s mission is to facilitate industry collaboration and agree a uniform strategy with representatives from throughout the Financial Services sector that will help the implementation and use of eCommerce across the market. Without such a strategy, the industry would become a chaotic mix of disparate, non-linking systems, with support costs rising to unsustainable levels.
Origo is working with product providers, software providers, financial advisers and portals to identify and define those elements of processing and information distribution that can be made common across the industry.
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Previous Case Studies
Pivotal Integration Case Study
March 2007
In June 2006 Scotland Online secured a three year contract with Pivotal Integration, one of Scotland’s fastest growing software developers. Working with clients from the public, finance, telecommunications and legal sectors, Pivotal specialises in delivering software solutions to customer-focused organisations.
Over the course of the past four years Pivotal has developed its own unique software manufacturing process, the Pattern-it® factory, which it has used to manufacture its complete suite of products. These software products can then be deployed on-site at a client’s premises or hosted from a remote location.
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Fife Council Case Study
December 2006
Fife Council goes live with Scotland Online
Fife Council, one of Scotland’s largest local authorities, has appointed Scotland Online on a two-year contract to upgrade and maintain its award winning community website www.fifedirect.org.uk.
The site, which was originally launched in 2004, provides residents and visitors to Fife with a wide range of information not only on Fife Council, but also on the Kingdom’s public services.
Employing over 22,000 people, Fife Council is the third largest authority in Scotland. With a budget of £580 million per year it is responsible for delivering all local government services in the region.
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Vianet
December 2006
Vianet provides connectivity services to local, national and global companies, helping them unlock the data held across widely distributed facilities and enabling them to provide new services to their customers in ways that are more creative, direct, immediate, profitable and dynamic.
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General Register Office for Scotland
In summer 2001 the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS) placed a tender in the European Journal seeking a business partner to develop an pay-per-view e-commerce web site which would allow customers to search and obtain genealogical information over the Internet. This project was a major expansion of an existing service that had been in operation since 1997. The stimulus for the expansion of the service was the increase in availability of digital assets resulting from the DIGROS project whereby all GROS births, deaths, marriages, OPR and census records – a store of around 50 million images – are being digitised.
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Scottish Widows
Scottish Widows is one of the most recognised brands in the life, pensions and investments industry and employs approximately 77,000 staff. There are 2,400 Scottish Widows branches servicing approximately 16 million customers worldwide.
The Brief
To provide a stable, secure and scalable hosting platform to host the entire Scottish Widows e-commerce infrastructure. Security and system stability were seen as key factors along with the requirement for an infrastructure that could grow with the client’s and the industry’s demanding requirements.
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Standard Life
Standard Life is one of the world’s leading financial services companies with total new premiums worldwide of £8bn last year. It has been awarded the top Triple A rating – the highest possible – by two leading international rating agencies.
The Brief
Standard Life required a new development and hosting partner for their extranet for Independent Financial Advisers (IFAs), the ifazone. The ifazone is a key channel for Standard Life, providing information and services to 7000 registered users. Standard Life had to find a provider that would be able to port and re-organise the existing content from the current web site, to place it onto a viable Content Management System (CMS), and to provide an ongoing hosting capability for the ifazone. To do this it was important to understand the business processes and map these to the evolved solution.
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