By Paul Kunert
7 October 2008
After 13 years at Bytes Technology Group (BTG) sales director Zak Virdi has resigned to take charge of expanding international operations including the UK for multi-territory licensing specialist and Microsoft LAR SoftwareONE.
At the same time, BTG has re-branded the company into Bytes Software Services and Bytes Document Solutions divisions – and has vowed to embark on an acquisition trail to buy-up services skills outside of Microsoft licensing.
To date, Software One and BTG have partnered by operating as agents in countries where each does not have a presence. Neil Murphy, UK managing director at BTG saw no reason for that to end any time soon.
“In the short term I don’t believe that SoftwareONE will be competing with us but long term their ambition for the UK will not preclude them from competing with LARs,” he told Microscope.
Yesterday Virdi resigned along with four other junior sales staff, all of whom are defecting to Software One which has European offices in Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Switzerland and in the US, Singapore, Malaysia, China and Brazil.
According to Darren Spence, group marketing director at BTG, Virdi had wanted to work abroad and when BTG shelved plans to set up offices in Asia, that avenue was suddenly closed.
“We can expand and use SoftwareONE’s [coverage] without the investment and [they can] continue to work with us in the UK,” he said.
Mandy Nicholson has been given the BTG sales director role in the UK and the other four junior sales roles have been filled.
Virdi - who has yet to be given a title at SoftwareONE - said it planned to continue working with UK partners including BTG although the strategy in the UK was yet to be finalised.
"SoftwareONE is a very ambitious company, it is the only independent pure play software provider in the world... I will have a global role, helping to develop core services projects and a global SAM capability," he said.
In terms of the re-branding exercise at BTG, Spence said it wanted two distinct divisions that clarified the nature of the business, “a single brand did not always explain to customers what we did”.
The software division sells Microsoft licenses, SAM and training packages but the plan is to diversify beyond volume sales and work with other vendors.
“We are looking at UK based acquisitions, we have identified a number of targets that could compliment our licensing business,” said Spence.
In 2006 Bytes acquired Xerox concessionaires Xclusive and Vantage Business Systems and this year it bought Planflow Systems but there are no more planned in copier channel in the short term.
In January Microsoft will restructure the rebates that LARs can achieve, as it has done with volume distributors, and will reward partners that sell higher margin products and offer more services.
In the six months to 31 August 2008, BTG achieved UK revenues of £85m compared to £70m in the period a year earlier and profit after tax of £2.3m.
