London’s International Financial Futures Exchange has joined the seven-strong client list of a small computer maintenance company established in 1989 by Lee Allwood, formerly with Granada Computer Services. Over the past 16 months, Allwood has recruited a further three directors, all from the Computer Field Maintenance arm of Granada Group Plc, and Switch Computing Ltd is now boasting that without the aid of institutional investors, it is on target to achieve UKP1m turnover by April, with net profits around 15%. Switch has a headcount of 15, including 11 engineers, and is targeting the City and London as its primary market. Simon Burton, Switch’s sales and marketing director, says that the company will either maintain equipment using its in-house skills, or subcontract back to the manufacturer. Burton believes that this enables the client to have one point of contact only, and it also means that Switch can offer installation-wide maintenance. The company is keen to draw a distinction between guaranteed response time offered by a number of maintenance companies and the guaranteed availability time that Switch includes in its contracts. Burton acknowledges that customers will pay for this service, but he argues that a two hour response time is meaningless if the subsequent repairs and maintenance take so long that they seriously affect a customer’s productivity.
