UCS partners to boost market share

Johannesburg, 15 Dec 2006

UCS has entered into a strategic partnership with Internet Solutions (IS) that will see the companies tap each other's customer base to increase market share.

The local partnership, conducted at a group level, is aimed at strengthening their combined market offerings. The deal came into effect at the beginning of last month, but was only announced yesterday.

Richard Newton, CEO of UCS Solutions - which forms part of the software solutions and outsourcing services division of the UCS Group - says the collaboration has the potential to boost the company's bottom line.

The agreement focuses on six areas of UCS's business, with a view to partnering each area with IS in a revenue-sharing manner that will hopefully see a multiplier effect being felt through the rest of the company, he says.

Newton adds that UCS considered other options - such as building capacity through a series of acquisitions - before deciding a partnership with IS would have the most benefit in what is rapidly becoming a commoditised arena.

"We expect to broaden this initial strategic partnership with further contractual arrangements between IS and the various trading subsidiary companies within the UCS Group."

Growth opportunity

The six areas of focus are the provisioning of network services, UCS's financial switching and value-added services, reseller arrangements, distributed infrastructure support, data centre hosting and product sales.

UCS's existing products and services are expected to complement and enhance the overall basket of options available to the IS network community, says a statement.

IS CEO Angus MacRobert says the deal is an attractive growth opportunity for both companies.

"We joined forces to effectively leverage off our respective market leading positions.

"The combined solutions offering is to be innovative and flexible while maintaining a customer-centric approach and harnessing UCS's particular strength in the retail and government vertical market sectors. We can now serve the widest range of customers with distributed locations."

The parties have embarked on a joint planning process for the implementation of the sale of the going concern business and the broader strategic partnership. This will incorporate further contractual arrangements between the network provider and the various trading subsidiary companies within the UCS Group.