Major school reseller born as Winthrop and Computelec merge

Two of Australia’s largest education solutions providers, Winthrop and Computelec, have merged to form a new national IT company.

The combined company has a headcount of 110 employees and a client base of 700 schools in all capital cities.

Winthrop chief executive Cedric Celestine is leading the newly combined company, while Computelec chief executive David La Bozzetta took a new role as general manager of education.

Celestine told CRN that the two companies would continue trading under their own names for the foreseeable future.

“For us, it will be business as usual. We will continue down the path that we’ve been going down, integrating the two businesses together to achieve operational efficiencies,” said Celestine.

“The interesting thing is both companies were both so similar, so we can adopt a similar marketing strategy.”

He added that the primary benefits would come from geographic expansion. Both companies have offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, while Computelec also operates in Brisbane, South Australia and Tasmania.

“There was a small amount of crossover in WA and Melbourne. Both companies, however, have well established client bases. The integration of the two companies will in fact give us the ability to offer those clients a greater range of services nationally.

“For Winthrop, it puts us back in Sydney as well as the additional states mentioned. The integration of the two companies really gives us the opportunity to combine the best practices from both companies to provide market leading sales, service, and engineering to our clients.”

Along with its education customer, Winthrop also operates in government, corporate and SMB sectors. Its services include project services, managed ICT services, cloud solutions, infrastructure and business consultancy.

Computelec on the other hand focuses predominantly on education. Its services cover cloud and managed services along with BYOD and device programs, server and storage and network infrastructure.

It also sells notebooks and tablets tailored for education from its online portal from vendors such as Acer, HP, Lenovo, Toshiba and Leader.

Winthrop was founded in 1996 and is owned by Australian ICT company CDM Australia.