Setting the pace | Ivan Bartolo

How did 6PM Holdings come about?

"6PM was founded by Ivan Bartolo in 1996. The company started to expand and employ people in 1999. The first major expansion happened when Malta joined the EU in 2004. From a small team of four people the company grew to 15 people.

"Growth remained steady and by 2007 when the Company listed on the Malta Stock Exchange, the company employed 70 people in Malta and the UK. Today, the 6PM Group employs just under 150 people between full time employees and contractors."

Can you brief our readers about the launch of the group's new branding 'Set the Pace'?

"To survive in the ICT industry, companies must re invent themselves and no doubt that 6pm has done just that in the last 18 months. After a terrible two years mainly due to the economic situation in the UK (2009 & 2010), the 6PM Group has secured a successful rights issue in 2011, went through two acquisitions, started new investments and kicked off its Business to Consumer strategy. In other words, 6PM is setting the pace.

"The 'Set the Pace' branding is also for 6PM employees, people are awarded for initiative, positive attitude, can do approach and integrity.

"Winning the Set the Pace trophy at 6PM is not something to be taken lightly, winning the trophy means recognition for nothing less than excellence."

StrokePad and Climate-HIV are the group's latest software. What are the benefits of such software?

"These two solutions were conceived through extensive surveys by the NHS whereby they both carried strong business cases.

StrokePad is driven by three main business objectives, namely improved patient care, reduced cost to the NHS and an enhanced probability for a better quality of life for Stroke patients. StrokePad, which has been designed by clinicians for clinicians, focuses on the most critical few hours when a patient experiences initial symptoms of a stroke or are indeed having a stroke.

Seconds make a difference in such situations and StrokePad is designed to very quickly capture critical patient data as part of the patient care pathway. It will assist clinicians to make more informed decisions at a very delicate stage.

"This system will therefore benefit the patient with a better chance of recovery and leading a normal life following a stroke, whilst the NHS would have improved patient care and at the same time reduce the cost of treatment following a stroke.

"Climate HIV has three main stakeholders, the NHS, the pharmaceutical companies and of course

the patient. The cost of HIV drugs is extremely expensive and better understanding of patient reactions to the various drugs that they would be taking is fundamental. The Climate system is intended to provide invaluable data to clinicians about patient reactions to treatment, whilst the

data captured will be analysed by pharmaceutical companies to establish how drugs can be further improved and in some cases potentially avoid the expensive process of creating new drugs. This will enhance patient care, whilst reduce the cost to the NHS.

In both cases, these solutions are designed and developed to required security standards and protocols in order to also meet all data protection requirements."

What other services does your firm offer?

• The 6PM Group is offering the following ICT services and products
• Retail - Personal Computing (Hardware, Accessories and Consumables)
• Retail - Small Businesses (Infrastructure Solutions)
• 6PM Infrastructure - Business ICT Infrastructure
• Operational & Management Solutions (Payroll, ERP, Finance & Management)
• Business Intelligence
• Data Warehousing
• Electronic Document Management
• Integrated Records Management
• Health Solutions
• Data Centre Solutions

Can you tell us more about your new website?

Following the launch of the company's new identity, 6PM has been working on its new website that marks the successful completion and consolidation of its brand image.

"We have created a more robust and easily navigated web-site that provides greater information about our solutions portfolio. Customers and prospective customers can quickly find what they are looking for and get a very good idea of what 6PM and its team is all about. "Through our new website,  we want to make sure that we are positioned to continue to improve our conversation with our customers and potential customers."

How is the company faring during a global economic crisis and stiff competition in the IT sector?

"2009 and 2010 were very tough and we lost significant revenues due to the economic crisis. Given our investments in 2011 and our 'Set the Pace' attitude, we are in a good space and currently profitable."

 Fundamental shifts are now occurring in the software Industry. 'Cloud' is becoming the new buzz word. What are the strategies 6PM Holdings is executing to meet today's fast-changing requirements?

"Through our bridge between Academia and Industry - www.quickfocus.com, we are now offering Cloud solutions. This will increase in many others in years to come."

How do you define a successful IT project?

"A successful project is when a project delivers a business solution on time to budget enabling the business (customer) to derive the expected business benefits."

How do you ensure peace of mind to your customers where IT security is concerned?

"First and foremost it is our people that make us different. We have a team of handpicked and committed individuals who have been certified to support and maintain all systems we provide.

Of late we have embarked on an offering refresh and can boast to have the most advanced product portfolio available on the market.

"We employ various levels of control and use a mixture of hardware and software to ensure that our clients' data is protected at all times."

What kind of application expertise and guarantees is your firm providing to customers?

"Our customers demand a solution and hence it is not just the IT component that 6pm delivers.  This means that 6PM has to earn its right to be engaged by clients through proven track records and confidence.

"6PM achieves this by having highly experienced IT professionals specialised in various business sectors. This brings benefit to our clients through technology expertise and clear understanding of their business sector. For example, our people working on health solutions understand the level of security and protocols needed such as HL7, the care pathways of patients within a hospital environment, the data quality requirements and much more.

"Our clients immediately recognise our overall expertise within their business sector and that provides 6pm with an immediate successful differentiator."

What customer demands and business trends will drive changes in software products, how they're developed, and the industry that provides them?

"We are living in an ever competitive environment and customers no longer see IT as an expensive necessity, but a business imperative to improve their service and reduce cost. Customers will demand quick business benefits from IT solutions to remain that one step ahead of their competition or indeed to continue to reduce cost. This is where the 6PM Agile Delivery Framework ensures that our customers gain business benefit quicker through an iterative and incremental delivery process."

Can you tells our readers about your IT solutions including your Quick^TM suite of prototyping products?

"6pm has always been at the fore-front when it comes to delivering business benefit to its customers, which is our main focus on every project. This has been achieved through the use of various practices based on the Agile philosophy.

"The 6PM Agile Delivery Framework is the result of years of experience working with different customers on projects which vary in scale and industry but with one constant: user involvement throughout. We have also made use of inhouse prototyping tools, which we have put to the disposal of our customers to secure a

common understanding of their business objectives and requirements, ensuring project success.  "The willingness to share such experience has led 6pm to embark on the Quick suite project 12 months ago to package such experience in simple-to-use products that are available to everyone

online.

"Our first product, QuickPM, is the Agile knowledge base with a difference. Besides the valuable information that we have put into this product, we are also providing the guidelines on how everything can be applied in practice, with over three hours of audio visual material scattered across the different pages.

"Moreover, we have international professionals on board who will share their experiences by contributing case study material. Besides providing the Professional with a wealth of information, QuickPM is being envisaged as the first brick in the bridge that 6PM will be building to span the gap between Academia and Industry.

"Registering for free on www.quickfocus.com automatically grants the user access to QuickPMLite, which is the first tier within this product.

"Another product within the Quick suite that has also been launched is QuickPA, the add-on for Microsoft Outlook 2007 purposely built to increase productivity. This product has packaged the main Outlook functions - emails, calendar appointments and tasks - into one seamless workflow to allow better time management.

"Other features within QuickPA are the real-time QuickPA Dashboards, QuickPA Conversation Composer and QuickPA Virtual Assitant.

"6PM would never have given life to such a project without a clear road map for the Quick suite and in fact, we are already working on refining our prototyping tools as well as developing a new product for powerful and practical self-development. There are many more bricks to come for this virtual bridge to be completed and we look forward to bringing these to the market."

How is 6PM positioning itself to stay ahead?

"We intend to pursue our Vision which is based on a product road map evolving over the next three years. We intend to get in to education and have a 6PM Academy that will have unique propositions to our market here in Malta.

"We shall continue to become experts and grow in Health, given our recent addition, emCare,  given our products in this space, we will continue to strive in this space. We believe that Health and Education are two pillars that we want to strive upon."

What are your hiring plans for 2013?

"Our aspirations are to grow the 6PM group in other areas. We trust that in 2013 we would be able to grow our workforce by at least another 25 people."