As the saying goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” The collaboration of the two Mandaluyong-based companies, Worklink Services Incorporated (WSI) and Arkipel, is an example of business and technology joining forces to go very far indeed. A marriage of true minds coming together to achieve lasting success.
In recent years, WSI, a logistics solution provider, had the enviable problem of rapid growth. But the company recognized that its technology solutions were not able to scale up with this growth. WSI president, Dexter A. Silva, and Quality Assurance Officer, Kit Burayag, took the plunge and asked Arkipel to address their nascent technology challenges. Arkipel, a server inrastructure and business solutions integration company has become WSI’s partner. Arkipel’s vision is to increase WSI’s value through IT and process integration.
The vision is not necessarily standard practice and novices may often learn the pitfalls of IT expansion the hard way. Some issues that many companies are ignorant of: the lack of hugely prohibitive costs of proprietary software and associated maintenace fees; the lack of an integrative business approach; and, binding annual contrats that may not be broken without incurring huge financial consequences. In a recent Computerworld article (cf. Steinour, August 2013), the massive fixed-cost increases to a company’s IT budget were cited in a discussion of proprietary software fees. the annual hikes in maintenance fees are steep and increase every year. For example, SAP (known for its enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations) requires client to spend between $2 million and $5 million on yearly maintenance. Furthermore, proprietary software often comes with a minimun one year contract commitment.
In contrast, Arkipel takes an unorthodox approach. “If you on’t like it, you can get rid of it, “says Arkipel Engineering Director, Rene P. Mader. He refers to the month-to-month contract which Arkipel offers all its clients. A company can test the waters and jump out if it feels the product is not a good fit. By deploying open source infrastructure on the Ubuntu Linux platform, Arkipel can offer competitively priced virtual servers and open source applications.