One of Asher Edelman’s more bizarre moves when he took control of Datapoint Corp was to float off the San Antonio, Texas company’s maintenance operations as InteLogic Trace Inc. Now London-based Datapoint Ltd is launching a third party maintenance service aimed at users of computer networks. The company already provides service and maintenance for its own equipment but according to Jim Blackwell of the new division, the company has become increasingly involved in maintaining other people’s equipment. Because we support open systems we found that people started attaching different terminals or whatever to Datapoint machines and asking us to maintain it. Maintenance contracts unassociated with Datapoint machines began to come from existing customers, a key player being British Telecommunications Plc which according to Blackwell gave the company a third party contract that was very large indeed. Recently Datapoint landed a contract worth around UKP350,000 with the lion of third party maintenance, Granada Group Plc. And Blackwell is quick to point out that Datapoint has British Standards Institute BS50750 approval for maintaining computers and call equipment, something which Granada lacks. However Datapoint will be concentrating on the networking end of the market, as opposed to Granda’s field – mainframes and micros as data communications is the area in which it already operates. Although a separate commercial entity, the maintenance division will draw on the 100 field engineers already employed by the company and use the 13 regional Datapoint offices. Blackwell says the company hopes to make around UKP3m from the new division in its coming financial year, adding to the UKP8m already garnered from its service division.
