Parity grows Irish Operations to support contract wins valued in excess of 13 million

    /24-7PressRelease/ - LONDON, UK, June 21, 2006 - As well as winning a contract extension with the Cabinet Office to provide candidate administration services for the Civil Service Fast Stream, (a training and development programme for high calibre graduates) worth 3.5 million over the next 3 years, Parity is developing e-Fire, the UK's first online Fire and Rescue Service portal in a contract worth 2million.

In addition, British American Tobacco, the international tobacco group, renewed its contract with Parity. The three-year framework agreement has a fixed value of 3 million, with additional consultancy and IT development (http://www.parity.net/solutions/microsoft ) projects bringing the total value to an estimated 6 million.

Critical to securing these wins, has been Parity Ireland's (http://www.parity.net/ireland ) core software development and applications management expertise based in the Antrim office where the majority of the 55 local staff are based and where key elements of the work are being undertaken for these contracts.

Alwyn Welch, Chief Executive of the Parity Group said of the contract wins:
"Our Antrim operation's contribution to these wins was very important and will be matched by our continued investment in the area. Many firms are choosing to 'offshore' IT services to countries in South Asia and Eastern Europe. However I'm delighted to say that we are able to use our strong and well established operation in Ireland as a competitive and credible alternative. We intend to deliver more work, and thereby create and sustain more jobs in Northern Ireland in the next year from clients on the mainland and locally."

Jeremy Fitch, Managing Director, Business International at Invest Northern Ireland,
"We are delighted with Parity's continued investment in Northern Ireland. It is a very positive development for the economy here to see a UK based Plc acknowledging the contribution of the highly skilled Northern Ireland workforce in these major UK contract wins."
The Parity Group operates in such sectors as government, utilities, telecommunications, finance, transport and professional services and also runs the successful Premiere Graduate Programme that has delivered 70m in benefits to over 7000 clients since its inception.
Editorial notes
About Invest Northern Ireland
Invest Northern Ireland is Northern Ireland's main economic development organisation.

We are working to increase wealth and prosperity in Northern Ireland. We do this by delivering expertise and resources to accelerate the creation and growth of businesses.

Focusing on the three key economic drivers of being entrepreneurial, being innovative, and being international, our goal is to help to:

- improve the competitiveness of our client companies
- create more positive attitudes to enterprise and more and better quality business start-ups
- increase innovation, R&D and commercialisation of research
- increase skill levels
- promote a stronger international focus by increasing inward investment and helping companies develop broader and better exports

We aim to be a world-class development agency that is a forward-looking and responsive champion of innovation, entrepreneurship and internationalisation.

About Parity Group Plc (http://www.parity.net ):

Parity, uniquely for its size, offers a full range of IT Services to major companies including:

Business process consultancy
IT Training
Management training
Change Management Training
Development and management of complex IT systems
Oracle and Microsoft technology and application skills
Permanent and temporary IT staff

Customers across the group include Alcatel, Allianz, AT&T, British American Tobacco, CISCO, Department for Education & Skills, Department for Work & Pensions, Glaxo Smith Kline, HBOS, Hewlett Packard, HM Revenue & Customs, HSBC, IBM, ICI, Ministry of Defence, NASA, Connecting for Health at the NHS, O2, Perot Systems, Royal Bank of Scotland, Royal Mail, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, The Cabinet Office, The Meteorological Office and T-Systems.

For more information on Parity, visit Parity (http://www.parity.net )
or contact Gina Cannon or Warren Tsoi at Parity.
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8543 5353
Email: [email protected]

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