NCR pushes managed services

US services automation vendor NCR has bundled previous offerings together in a managed services package primarily targeting larger players in the retail and finance verticals.

Noel Pettitt, south pacific area GM in NCR's customer services division, said the new global offering would market NCR services targeting financial services, automatic transaction machine support, retail and IT infrastructure verticals.

'I would think it suited customers with 500-plus employees but there are some exceptions to that,' he said.

However, Pettitt implied there would only be limited opportunities for the Australian channel to assist in the offering. NCR had already partnered major vendors such as Cisco, Nortel, D-Link, Microsoft and Sun, he said.

'We will partner with organisations as appropriate. [But] that traditional outsourcing market is not what we're targeting. We are looking upstream and downstream for a partnering perspective,' Pettitt said.

'This is not an IBM GSA play. It is about the provision of services to an organisation in the infrastructure space,' Pettitt added.

NCR's PR company confirmed that NCR's IT infrastructure services offering already competed with companies such as KAZ, EDS and IBM.

As part of an associated restructure of the services division, 'about five' Australian staff had been laid off in the past three months but Pettitt claimed the changes would boost employee numbers over time.

'They were mainly [technicians] from the field delivery organisation,' Pettitt said.

NCR, in a statement released by its PR company, claimed to be restructuring its services division to take advantage of the drive for selective sourcing of IT support and outsourcing non-core competencies.

'Gone are the days of a one-size-fits-all services offering,' the company said.

NCR's new managed services offering will use its Teradata data analysing capability to combine service transaction data with mining tools, NCR said.

Pettitt said NCR had three core strengths it hoped to harness in its managed services package.

'We are strong in ... call holding, fixing the machines in the right place at the right time, and we are good at spares logistics,' Pettitt said.

Pettitt would not say how much business NCR did in Australia but said that it was 'in line with the rest of the world, where Australia represents two to three percent of the global market'.

NCR has 1100 employees in Australia and New Zealand.

NCR Corporation in the US reported net income of US$9 million, or US$0.09 per diluted share for the quarter ending 30 June 2003, down from US$26 million, or US$0.25 per diluted share, in the second quarter 2002. Operating income for the second quarter was US$16 million, down US$35 million from the second quarter last year.

The company reported revenue of US$1.37 billion for the second quarter, down one percent from the same quarter 2002.