February 2006 TEKenable, the specialist software house delivering high-end software and consulting solutions to Government, Finance and Healthcare sectors, has won a four year development contract with DataKraft. TEKenable will undertake ongoing product development of the dataKraft Studio platform and, in particular, will provide integration with Vista and Office 2007.

Earlier this year, dataKraft won, for the second time, a Highly Commended at the annual Project Development Centre (PDC) awards ceremony in Dublin. The company has customers in a number of vertical markets from large corporates, such as Dalkia Ireland, to smaller service-driven SMEs. It has also managed to win business in both the public and private sector and is currently engaged with potential clients in Northern Ireland.

Nick Connors, TEKenable Director says: “We are delighted to win this contract with dataKraft. We specialise in .NET development and our team has extensive experience integrating products on the Microsoft Platform.

“The DataKraft studio is developed for SMEs that are comfortable working with MS Office. Our development partnership will focus on tightly integrating dataKraft solutions with MS Office and Outlook in particular.”

At the heart of the company is dataKraft Studio, a software platform based on .NET technology, which is used to design database applications without coding. Designing any database solution with dataKraft Studio is 20 times faster than traditional development.

DataKraft uses the DataKraft Studio to design bespoke applications for SMEs, focusing on CRM, HR, Project Management, and Sales solutions. The application supports multiple databases (MS Access, SQL Server, SQL Server Express, My SQL, Oracle) ensuring that clients are not tied to any one database vendor and allowing for future migrations.

Founder and CEO of dataKraft, Jacques Lefebvre says: “To accelerate our product development, we examined a number of options including outsourcing to Poland, India and China. We also met a great many software development companies on our recent trip to Hong Kong. We wanted to ensure that we choose a partner with proven experience integrating with Office and significant .NET expertise so TEKenable were the obvious choice.

“We also felt that they understood the DataKraft concept and its importance as a new choice for SME information management.”

The custom development landscape is changing as SMEs demand the flexibility of bespoke development but faster and cheaper. “Flexibility, speed and cost are the three mantras of the SME,” continues Lefebvre. “Our customers are no longer bound to expensive development or fixed packages. All DataKraft solutions can be extended without coding and we also support multiple databases so they are never constrained to a single Database vendor.”

The four year contract was signed in June following negotiations between the two companies.

Director, Peter Rose, commented on the underlying technology and approach taken by dataKraft: “Fortunately the approach that dataKraft has taken in Product development to date was one of flexibility and simplicity which will enable my team to create the maximum value for their customers leveraging their existing systems, and allow us to take full advantage of the benefits of WPF, WinFX, Vista and Office 07 releases going forward into the future.”

Ends

For more information, please contact:

Carol McKeon DataKraft 01 239 32 70
Jillian Godsil PRG 053 94 294 55