First review for tecsys-IT HAUS

tecsys came to the market in Luxembourg one year ago […]

May 17, 2011

tecsys came to the market in Luxembourg one year ago with some very ambitious goals and announced a five year plan to become one of the leading company’s in IT solutions. After the first twelve month it is time the review this progress with the two executive director’s of tecsys.

How would you describe today the goals you had, when launching the project? Can you describe the progress you made until today?

Michael Mossal: Of course! The goals are still described in the same way as 2010: Our ambition was to represent one unique structure with more than 70 Mio € turnover in the Grande Region. We started with 130 IT professionals. The aim was to create and establish a company with a 100 % Luxembourgish management and corporate identity. Combining best customer experience and German state-of-the-art processes with a Luxembourgish corporate identity and long-term market knowledge should become the key success factor of tecsys. Less then 30 minutes connect the IT-HAUS headquarter in Trier/Föhren, one of the most awarded, modern IT buildings in the region, with the tecsys head office in Luxembourg City. Purchasing department, Logistic-, Marketing-, Backoffice, ITIL aligned Service Desk and Labs are located in the headquarter. Based on this structure we can offer our customers: Professional process and stock management, Professional pre- and post sales support, Best pricing for hardware and software components, Quickest delivery and Installation, Maintenance, Repair service and Trainings.

Today we can consider that we are far ahead of our initial targets for the first 12 months. In Luxembourg we did a turnover of round about 5 Mio Euro in the first year. According to the IT-Infrastructure guide released by IT-Nation in 2010, this positions us just below companies like Computacenter in Luxembourg, a company that is on the market since a long time. In addition our company managed to be cash positive in the first year, which is rare in our days. Together with our German collegues we gave us last year a joined target of 70 Mio Euro. Germany continued their growth as well by doing 71 Mio only in Germany. We represent together a pool of 160 experts in the Grande Region. The virtual team serving Luxembourg today are 35 people. Half of them are located in Luxembourg.

What did make you believe in the success when you started and what did motivate to launch that project?

Michael Mossal: The new tecsys project was something that was build up on a very solid foundation. Both of us, Frank and myself, had been in this business for years as a part of two very successful luxembourgish IT companies in the past. We did know exactly what was possible and what we had to do. In 2009 both of us where committed to projects outside of the classical IT infrastructure business and if someone would have come 2 years earlier with the opportunity probably none of us would have been interested. It was the right moment in time.  The plans to team up with IT-Haus in the product business have been developed already in 2007. We started a joined go to market model between tecsys S.A.R.L. and IT-HAUS in 2009 and based on the that successful pilot we presented the business plan to the shareholder beginning of 2010. IT-HAUS was the missing link it stands for a solid backend structure, German quality standards and processes.

Frank Back: When I was asked if I would like to join the project I was immediately interested. I saw the tremendous dynamic and the opportunity of the project and was sure that I could investigate myself fully to make it a success.

When did you decide your brand name and what does it today stand for?

Michael Mossal: tecsys is a very powerful  brand name that is still today known by customers from the 90s and associated with building trust to establishing a community around a IT projects. Most of all it stands for its people and their ability to execute their job to help customers in success with their challenging IT projects. Further tecsys stands for the dynamic that Frank mentioned earlier. IT-HAUS was voted in 2010 by COMPUTERWOCHE for the 2nd time in a row as the 2nd best System House in Germany. In our logo we underline our project focus and dynamic of the tecsys brand with the power, quality and credibility of IT-HAUS. The luxembourgish press somewhere invented our slogan “we ARE different”. We try to highlight our dynamic by very agile marketing campaigns with rare sports cars and bikes. We are sponsoring and organizing Porsche G3 and Motorbike track days with our customers. Luxembourg is traditionally a very conservative market. Our image is seen as different to the others and from marketing point of view we took benefit of that.

Frank Back: “we ARE different” stands also for a different business model that we introduced. I describe it often as a “LuxDe” model instead of a classical “BeLux” model. We fully respect the local business rules of our partners, but thanks to IT-HAUS we are able to also fully take advantage of the German distribution to provide best pricing and delivery times to our customers. We see us confirmed because other companies on the local market started in the meantime to copy this model. In addition we are obviously, thanks to our IT-HAUS backoffice, because of our own logistic and stock management very competent in pure box moving. We are also different in our sales approach. Our more business related history allows us to position projects not only form the IT angle but often from the business perspective. This is facilitated by strong partnerships in those areas with sister companies like Orgavision (ERP) and exigo (business consulting).

So what do you see as your major achievements in the last months?

Michael Mossal: When we came to the market, we positioned us with a service portfolio focused on IT transformation, Datacenter automation and Cloud computing. This was a very clear, future driven focus, giving us a certain advantage over our competitors. While others still prevented to talk about migrating Microsoft Exchange in the cloud, because they where afraid that it cannibalized their revenue in hardware selling, we did already first cloud migration projects. An example is Wagner Schaffner. – Our traditional business remains helping our customers to realize their business projects in IT and help them to implement and measure IT processes. Some customer examples in 2010 have been Tango, ZithaKlinik and DKV Globality. Here we found beside HP, with Microsoft an additional, very future driven partner. But the biggest achievement we made where around Desktop Virtualization. In most cases there was a real business driver behind. Perfect exemples are DZ Privatbank in Luxembourg formally known and DZ BANK International who came with a new business model and branch office concept and found in tecsys a strategic partner for the design and implementation of a VDI concept. Further Cetrel where VDI facilitated the implementation of their new core system and allows publishing customer related parts of this core system to their customers (the banks). What we see as the most important achievement is that we have many very committed customers who trusted us already in the early days. The long-term customers together with new customers see us today as a strategic partner and trusted advisor. We are of course very proud about that and we are very committed to them as well. Now we are just started and we have great potential. We plan some announcements in the very near future that will show this potential in the form of projects where Luxembourg as country benefits and that are highly visible in the market.

 

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