Synergy exits volume business

ASX-listed Synergy has shut down its volume desktop and laptop business to focus on services and solutions.

As part of the restructure it will close its $30 million ACT business in January which housed six staff.

It also planned to shut down its Tasmanian branch which had three staff, although it would maintain an engineer in the state.

Chief executive Garry Henley told CRN that the ACT branch was "very successful", but did not offer many services.

“It was high volume laptops for government offices,” he said.

Further, national sales manager Joe Arucci was retrenched along with 32 sales staff as part of a national sales team revamp.

“Joe worked through that process with us,” Henley said. “He was successful in that role but the sales team has been reduced."

Henley said the strategy wasn’t to “bring the head count down”, rather to grow to services.

“We’ve moved a lot of people into various roles so there was only a handful of roles that we weren’t able to fill.

“We restructured so we really are focused on solutions, services and annuity.

“We will still provide our full suite of products to our customers but they may be included as part of our solutions.

"And, we’ll still have strong relationship with IBM, HP and Cisco but we’ll be approaching them as a total service,” Henley said.

Henley joined the integrator as chief executive from Alphawest in February.

At its November annual general meeting Synergy appointed Frank Stranges as executive chairman. At the time Synergy reported it had 290 staff.

“We had an AGM in Perth and in that meeting the board committed to changing the business.”

“At the AGM there was handover and as part of that process we sat down and worked out where were at.

“We were working on a plan for the same-sized business, but jumped to the end point instead. 

“We’ll be making some announcements and offering cloud based hardware as a service in partnership with a key partnership,” he said.

Last year Synergy acquired Leading Solutions from administrators.

It changed its name from ComputerCorp to Synergy to promote its national focus and transition into managed services.