Interpath Teams Up With Deloitte & Touche Outsourcing

To combine application-hosting services with consulting and systems integration components, Interpath Communications Inc. has formed a partnership with Deloitte & Touche Outsourcing, a business process outsourcing division within Big Five accounting firm Deloitte & Touche.

With the partnership, Interpath gains expertise in implementing enterprise-resource-planning applications. "We determined early on that our infrastructure could accommodate a partner, and decided that business-process outsourcing was a good business to expand out to," says Interpath chairman and CEO Joel Schleicher.

Interpath owns data-center facilities in Australia and Raleigh, N.C. The service provider had been offering its clients consulting and systems integration services, but it's branching out to work with service providers like Deloitte & Touche Outsourcing and Clarkston Group because of their experience with specific applications from companies such as J.D. Edwards and Lawson.

The partnership is a sign of the market's demand for specific expertise and the full lifecycle of services--consulting, systems integration, and ongoing outsourcing, says Lew Hollerbach, research director in Aberdeen Group's IT services group. "The combination of these two is more than the sum of the parts," he says. "No ASP is in a position to have a professional services staff the size of Deloitte & Touche. And this also gives Deloitte exposure to the application hosting market, where they haven't done much work before."