Arab companies residing in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) will now have access to a shared services provider, courtesy of IBM (News - Alert). The computing giant has inked a deal with Tanfeeth, a fully owned subsidiary of Emirates NBD, the UAE’s largest bank, to help the company deliver business process services to surrounding clients.

Under the terms of the agreement, IBM will provide Tanfeeth will the tools and solutions necessary to help their clients improve services across finance, accounting, administration and human resource departments. IBM will also offer training and consultancy services, and will manage part of Tanfeeth’s delivery portfolio.

Tanfeeth will also look to enhance its clients' business process management and workflow management capabilities by leveraging several IBM software solutions, including Business Process Management Suite, Command Center and Time Volume Capture. In addition, IBM will provide hands-on training to Tanfeeth employees and grant them 24-hour access to IBM’s online training solution. Top employees will also be invited to participate in IBM’s worldwide leadership training program.

“We are focused on making our clients’ processes more efficient, consistent and most importantly, more fundamentally geared towards making their customers happier,” Tanfeeth Chairman Abdulla Qassem noted in a statement.

“We have intimate local market knowledge, while IBM offers global reach and our strategic agreement is underpinned by such compatibilities,” he added.

John Lutz, general manager of IBM Global Process Services, said that emerging markets like those in Middle East are now in a position to benefit from business process services. He said that Tanfeeth, with the help of IBM, will be able to deliver a “blend of efficiencies, business model transformation and predictive analytics…with an industry focus.”

Lutz told ITP.net that IBM believes as much as 30 percent of its business will come from emerging markets by 2015.

“The market is maturing, people are believing in centers of excellence, that they cannot do everything on their own, it has to be with a partnership,” he told the news source.

Tanfeeth hopes the partnership with IBM will help increase its staff from the current 700 to more than 3,000 in the next two years. Tanfeeth is poised to become the first recognized shared services provider in the GCC.

Beecher Tuttle is a TMCnet contributor. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell