ENGINEERING

New appointment Bob Finney leads

OCF has launched a new analytics business unit to help UK businesses extract value from data. The company is also hoping to use its HPC heritage, capability and resources to manage analytics deployments on behalf of major software vendors. 

OCF has appointed data analytics expert, Bob Finney, who joins from IT infrastructure firm, SICL, to lead the business unit. He was previously client manager for Oracle, group sales director for XMA, national sales manager for Capita IT Services and client director for ComputerCenter.

“Customers in the private sector and public sector such as police and universities are increasingly storing large volumes of data that without adequate analytics is going to waste,” says Bob Finney, new business development manager [analytics], OCF. “Police need support with fraud management activities, universities need to better understand student trends and retailers need to better analyse customer buying habits, for example.”

He adds: “Our analytics proposition will enable customers to extract value from their data. We can use our existing eco-system of partners and our own technical expertise to integrate and manage the necessary on-site hardware and software. Alternatively, we can provide the analytics as a hosted service, which reduces ongoing costs and complexity for the customer. We expect around 60 per cent of our analytics business to come from hosted services.” 

He concludes: “For large analytics software vendors such as IBM, we feel that our heritage in data deployments – HPC, data management and data storage - makes OCF the ideal delivery partner. This is a natural evolution of our existing capabilities.”