Enterprise infrastructure and solutions company Ecquaria Technologies has been awarded a $4.7 million contract to build an integrated Service Portal fro Brunei’s Ministry of Communications. Ecquaria is part of a consortium commissioned by the ministry to design and deploy a centralized eGovernment platform that the Government agencies and their appointed vendors can develop on and roll out robust Web Services rapidly, efficiently and securely for use by the public.

Under the service agreement , Ecquaria’s flagship enterprise infrastructure software, Ecquaria Service-Oriented Platform (Ecquaria SOP) will be used to power the ministry-wide intranet, an integrated Service Portal that will host public information on all the agencies of the ministry. In addition, a new electronic billing system and other eServices will be developed for the portal using Ecquaria SOP.

Ecquaria SOP enables organizations to automate their business processes and provide an efficiently integrated information flow. While providing critical and complete information across the enterprise, Ecquarai SOP supports key business objectives to help the enterprise to manage all aspects of its business.

The new portal solution, will built-in single sign-on authentication features, represents the Brunei Government’s customer-centric approach to e-Services delivery. It is specifically designed to address the security and availability needs of the ministry’s data centre and disaster recovery centres in addition to streamlining information and eServices catered to the different needs of its users – internal users as well as citizens and businesses.

“We are pleased to team up with Ecquaria who clearly demonstrated to us their experience, capabilities and proven track record for other governments,” said Mr Ang Kian Guan, Director of IT, Research & Development, Ministry of Communications, Brunei Darussalam. “We look forward to working with Ecquaria on harnessing the power of new technologies to meet the demand of citizens and businesses.

“Through the new single electronic gateway, we can now facilitate a higher level of communication and collaboration among geographically dispersed agencies as well as with the public users.”

Ecquaria’s open and extensible process-driven infrastructure will enable the Brunei Government to build integrated services across multiple agencies easily and efficiently – and at the same time, provide a secure environment to ensure a seamless and concurrent development of eServices.

“With our successes in implementing large –scale eGovernment projects, we are proud and delighted to partner with the Brunei Government in extending our expertise to help propel its national efforts in transforming itself to become a leading networked government in the world,” said Dr Foong Wai Keong, President and CEO of Ecquaria.

“Ecquaria SOP is a tried and tested platform that has been successfully deployed in government. We bring to brunei our proven track record and experience we have accumulated in working on eGovernment projects for governments such as Singapore, Thailand and Mexico.”

In Singapore, Ecquaria implemented two key large-scale electronic public services projects – the Public Service Infrastructure (Psi) and Online Application for Integrated Services (OASIS) under the Singapore government’s eGovernment Action Plans I and ll respectively.

Ecquaria also announced its plan to expand its market focus in ASEAN by strengthening its leadership in eGovernment initiatives.

“We see growing opportunities from Governments in ASEAN who are increasingly looking to help individuals and businesses simplify the use of public services. Southeast Asia is on a growth curve and new opportunities are sprouting for Singapore’s companies Given that more than 70 per cent of our projects are eGovernment in focus, we believe Ecquaria is well positioned to capitalize on the niche eGovernment market opportunities the region offers,” said Dr Foong.

This article is reproduced with permission from IE Singapore.

Source: i.e. journal, Issue 19, April/May 2005