Ex-Synergy staff lead Accucom's managed services charge

Sydney-based integrator, Accucom, has snapped up several ex-Synergy employees to build out its managed services capabilities.

Former managed services director for ASX-listed Synergy, Roy Pater, along with manager, Michael Van Zoggel, and business development manager, Karl Pickering, are part of a new division devoted to building and delivering managed services.

Accucom managing director, Sam Sarkis, said it had been in the managed services game for some time but was looking to formalise its position and offerings to sell to new and existing clients.

“We’ve been doing managed services as a knee-jerk reaction to our existing customers,” Sarkis said. “We saw an opportunity, so we’d offer the service. But more and more customers are wanting these offerings, so we tossed around the idea of looking into it holistically and marketing a branded suite of services.

“This is about having a clear and defined set of products we can deliver, then reaching new customers.”

Accucom was established by Sarkis and his wife, Linda, in 1988 and targets organisations with 50-500 seats. Its suite of managed services are based on a combination of in-house and third-party systems and include managed desktop, datacentre, service desk, hosting, data and voice.

It also owns an ISP business and partners with HP, Cisco, Microsoft and Novell.

The three new Accucom employees will be supported by a dedicated team of 20 services staff.

“I’m of the mindset that if you don’t allocate the appropriate resources, you’re not likely to succeed,” Sarkis said. “You need resources to achieve customer satisfaction and provide a great experience.”

Pater and Sarkis wouldn’t divulge specific revenue targets but hoped to double Accucom’s total managed services business in the first 12 months. Sarkis also flagged acquisitions as a key focus in 2010.

“There are a lot of companies that have been hit by the GFC – business owners who are technical and don’t understand how to manage a business have been hit particularly hard,” he said.

Pater, Van Zoggel and Pickering resigned from Synergy (formerly ComputerCorp) in November. At the time, Pater told ARN he was looking to either set-up his own company, or work within a privately-owned organisation wanting to build a managed services practice.

Pater, who has invested in the division and heads up the managed services team, said he was attracted to Accucom because of its services culture and systems, along with solid reputation in the vendor and customer communities.

“It has the full gamut of managed services offerings, but has not had an official product offering to take to market,” he said. “The biggest downfall for most services organisations are their systems. But because Accucom built up around engineering and services, the service desk, monitoring tools and ticketing systems are very good… you can’t keep going back to customer two or three times to find out if something has been done.

“Accucom is also agile and can move quickly. The market will change over the next 12-24 months and if you can’t adapt quickly, you will die.”

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