Computacenter has made five smaller North American acquisitions over eight years. You’ve made one big one. Was that a deliberate ploy?
Softcat’s mode of operation and culture is something we wanted to protect. What we don’t want is to distract our UK and Ireland business from the pathway it’s already on. So we were always interested in investing in something with a scale that we could put emphasis and investment behind and bring our know-how to, but which wouldn’t drag our key management leadership out of our business and be a distraction.
We wanted to acquire something that was a really substantial base for us, where we knew we could add value, but equally we knew would be able to run with a great degree of autonomy and freedom and responsibility as well.
The larger acquisition for us made sense for those reasons.
The way we’ll drive this forward now is to allow both businesses to continue to invest and run along the tracks we’re already on, and over time we’ll find ways to add value between and on top of the way those operations already work.
There’s a whole host of ways that the collaboration between the two jurisdictions and capabilities can work better together. We’ll find those ways of adding value and build them over time on top of what is already there. Both businesses get to achieve their standalone potential and the potential of the combination without disruption.
So I can take it from that that there are no immediate plans to rebrand it as Softcat?
No. They’ve got good resonance in their market with their branding. They’ve got very significant, deep capability around the datacentre and the network. We will likely rebrand them to Softcat over time, but they will stay GDT for now. The timing’s not important to us. We’re in no rush around that. We’ll find the right time together to do that, but it’s probably a way in the future.
Interview continues on next page…
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