Southern Cross Computer Systems on the acquisition hunt

Victorian-based service provider, Southern Cross Computer Systems (SCCS), is on the acquisition trail as it plans to expand its business.

SCCS managing director, Mark Kalmus, said the ideal company needs to add significant value to its portfolio and have complementary business software or mobility solutions.

"We're not rushing into it," Kalmus said. "The biggest risk you run into is if they have the right fit in culture, customer service, agility and do they have the same values that we have? Our core values are agility, industriousness, caring, excellence and integrity. We drill that into our staff non stop."

Some of the other types of challenges that crop up when it comes to acquisition is whether the business can be integrated quickly enough, and if you can cross-sell their capability through your existing structure easily without having to wait up to two years to achieve that investment benefit, Kalmus said. Most of the time, organisations also have a misguided view of their value, but Kalmus said a company is only worth what someone is prepared to pay for it.

This year, SCCS, has made a string of hires to its business and is continuing to hire more staff across its consulting, technology solutions, managed services and traditional infrastructure practices.

"In the last few months we've put on eight people and I only wanted to put on 12 for the year. There's growth coming out of our business where we have to put additional skills on, and the challenge is getting the right skilled people," he said. " But at the same token we have to make sure that we don't grow too quickly. We have to control and manage our growth, you can't hire people unless there's a good business case for it."

Kalmus highlighted most of its growth has been coming from its consulting, infrastructure and integration of technology services and managed services practice, which it had made a lot of investments recently in its backend system and tools.

" We've been able to scale more effectively into larger sites and more customers because we've got the capacity to handle that now," he said. "In our consulting practice, we've got deep expertise and experience in information security consulting, disaster recovery and business continuity planning. We're finding that we're getting a lot of business there because people are identifying it's core area they've historically neglected. Major corporates are realising that they need to make sure they've got the right processes in place and the right people to track the processes."

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