Meet Our Partners: Blue Turtle

A short interview with Tommy Erlank, General Manager (Enterprise Application Management) at Blue
Turtle, a South African IT and advisory consulting company which provides solutions for optimising, enhancing and leveraging existing IT investment.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?

"Established in 2003, Blue Turtle Technologies is a South African company which provides solutions for optimising, enhancing and leveraging existing IT investment, and supporting the cost effective delivery of new technology initiatives. We deliver solutions for the effective management of IT infrastructures employing innovative software products, backed by ‘best-practice’ implementation services".

 Could you let us know any further information?
"Blue Turtle currently serves more than 500 customers with software products and services throughout Southern Africa".

Who is the typical user of your product or service?

"Blue Turtle customers operate in a wide range of industries including Financial, Energy, Manufacturing, Retail, Hospitality, Healthcare, Consulting, Utilities, Government, Telecommunications".

What do you do for Blue Turtle and what are you responsible for?

"I have been with Blue Turtle since 2008 and am responsible for the Application Management business unit. Here we focus on how customers build applications, how they test them and how they roll them out into production. Critical to our customers’ success, we partner with leading vendors who specialise in key aspects of this lifecycle, for example Lightstreamer for applications with real-time data and messaging requirements. Our core competencies include mainframe, distributed, mobile, SAP, Oracle e-Business and Big Data analytical applications".

Which products and solutions your company offers?

"Blue Turtle’s offering includes software products and services in the following competency areas:
1) Infrastructure Management (BMC, IBM, Dell, Microsoft, Adaptiva, Ayehu, Macro4, SANScreen, Vanguard, etc)
2) Applications Management (Serena, HP Software, CA, Parasoft, REALTECH, OpenText, Grid-tools, Red-Gate, Unitask, etc)
3) Data Management (Informatica, Quest, etc)
4) Advisory Services (IT Service Management Assessments, Rapid Performance Assessments, Data Quality and Privacy Assessments, Application and Infrastructure Security Assessments, etc)".

Blue Turtle have a large number of selected partners (e.g software vendors). Which strategies are adopted to add products and solution in your portfolio? Which requirements must be met?

"Blue Turtle is always on the lookout for technology vendors to complement our business units’ capabilities. Analyst reviews and customer use cases are included in our evaluation, but mostly, it boils down to a specific vendor who addresses a customer challenge in a unique way, adding a competitive advantage for us and our customers".

Could you please describe the specific characteristics of your market(s)?

"We serve large enterprise and small to medium companies across Southern Africa".

Blue Turtle is a Lightstreamer reseller. Which are your future plans about the product?

"We are currently putting together a marketing campaign for Mobile Applications which include Lightstreamer and our big data analytical solutions. We will be targeting financial companies, including Banks, Healthcare, Insurance".

The Broadband Commission, an international body set up by the ITU and UNESCO, released its “The State of Broadband 2013” report, showing that South Africa’s broadband penetration is poor, though the catch-up is hectic. Do you think that the data flow resampling feature of Lightstreamer could be appreciated by your domestic customers developing Rich Internet Applications?

"Yes, we are also discussing this for customers with operations in Africa, where bandwidth is very poor and expensive. We are also talking to media/tv companies with regard to their set top boxes".

Why Blue Turtle trusted Lightstreamer among many other commercial solutions for real-time data streaming?

"Your track record in financial services meant that you are an established company and that the software is stable. This is very important for us as a representative".

We would be very grateful if you would like to provide a short recommendation to testify your experience with Lightstreamer technology and its support team.

"Although new to the Lightstreamer family, our experience with the broader team has been excellent thus far and we look forward to working with your organisation".