The ICL Sorbus multi-vendor business that was formed when Bell Atlantic Corp handed over its 49% stake in the Sorbus joint venture to ICL Plc (CI No 2,609), has been around all the time, we just haven’t noticed it, according to the Putney, London-based company. ICL Sorbus is a combination of ICL Customer Service units in the UK and Europe and the Sorbus joint venture. Together, ICL says the new business will generate revenues of around ú550m this year. In Europe – where customers deal with ICL – it boasts more than 5,000 staff and 100 service centres, and ranks fourth in the league of independent multivendor service companies, according to ICL. Customers in the Asia-Pacific region and the US conduct their business with Fujitsu Ltd and Bell Atlantic respectively. Worldwide it claims 40,000 customers making 20,000 service calls each day. Its aim is for turnover to reach ú1,500m by 2000. The business is split into four ‘business streams’, as ICL is fond of calling them. DataCentre Services looks after the public sector and other large corporate users’ systems, Point of Service deals with the retail and emerging Small Office-Home Office sectors, Professional Services provides consultancy services and specialises in networks and project management, while Desktop services concentrates on all types of personal computer, Unix and other desktop support. It is the last of these streams that ICL says is the most dynamic. The reason for ICL Sorbus’s existence is, according to strategy and marketing director Phil Murray, changing customer demands. According to ICL’s figures, services have grown as a proportion of the European information technology industry to 35% in 1993 from 22% in 1988, and will climb to 43% by 1998.
Cover the whole lifecycle
In the same period hardware spending declines from 46% through 38% to 30%. As maintenance revenues also decline, companies such as ICL must look to add value to their vendor business. Murray implies that this is happening almost without the company trying – users willing the vendors to become partners rather than suppliers. ICL Sorbus is promoting itself as a vendor that can cover the whole lifecycle, with a particular emphasis on the desktop and network businesses, from evaluation of a company’s needs right through to disposal or redeployment of old equipment and everything in between. In order to meet these changing customer needs, the company is currently in the process of exploiting key technologies from Bell Atlantic, though it would not be more specific. The next step on the metamorphosis is a service products launch early in May which will add a bit of sparkle to the service, according to Murray, who admitted that until now it had been frankly drab. ICL believes the European desktop service market will rise from ú2,000m revenues last year to become a ú6,000m business by 2000, by which time it will be larger than the Data Centres sector, according to the company. Desktop service revenues in the UK for ICL Sorbus were ú120m in 1994, some ú50m ahead of its nearest rival, according to ICL, and it is forecasting a turnover increase of 20% this year. Apart from the product launch in early May, ICL Sorbus has other plans for the immediate future. It will announce two partnerships in the next couple of months, possibly with one or more of Novell Inc, Microsoft Corp or Intel Corp, with which it is already involved. It will also overhaul its customer care programme, inaugrate a single, pan-European help desk and launch a brand-awareness campaign.
