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.

ITnation: How would you describe today the goals you had, when launched the project and 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.

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

mmo: 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.

Franck Bach: 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.

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

mmo: 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 2^nd time in a row as the 2^nd 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.

fba: “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).

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

mmo: 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 examples 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). More classic examples are Unicredit Luxembourg who teamed up with tecsys for the VDI based design of the future desktop or Commerzbank Luxembourg where we did help them in the IT infrastructure merger with Dresdner Bank. Our marketing is currently working on a brochure to highlight the success stories of the first 12 months. 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.

ITnation: We have been talking about your customers, whom do you see as strategy partners and what to they mean for your strategy?

mmo: Beside the local partnership we mentioned already earlier, obviously strategic vendor partnerships are very important for an integrator like tecsys, but the way that these partnerships are working are totally different if you compare them with the past. First of all the different constructors have increased the requirements and try to limit the number of their partners. The second thing is that the integrator has much more added value than in the past. While customers traditionally did team up with one or two hardware constructors and their applications defined the platform, today the virtualization layer between the business applications and the hardware layer became the most important building block. As neither the hardware constructor nor the owner of the hypervisor is able to provide an independent view on the customer’s request, the integrator has today the unique chance to become the most important partner for all parties involved. This is a very powerful but also responsible function. To answer the question: Clearly VMware and Citrix the most important partners on the hypervisor layer where we aim for the highest partnership level. Traditionally on the hardware layer we have HP where we are unique in that sense that we cover HP Software and the Converged Infrastructure competency.

fba: The Converged Infrastructure partnership level and the required competencies combine the highest level of Server, Storage, Network, Power/Cooling and Management certifications. tecsys is one of the only partners in Luxembourg who is promoted by HP on that level.

mmo: But in the meantime we have a very solid and promising partnership with EMC and we are talking to IBM as well. Then we have Microsoft, where we do all the classic desktop and backoffice applications like Exchange, SQL or Lync. We have been the launch-partner for the Microsoft Cloud platform in Luxembourg and we became the first Microsoft partner in Luxembourg with a Gold Competency in System Management. We made it very clear that we did not want to step into network and security when we came to the market 12 month ago. Even if we have the required competences and Cisco certifications in Germany we don’t want to start the fight on all borders. In the meantime this market is under a huge pressure as well. We see network and security companies digging into the storage and server market especially because they follow the strategy of Cisco. Some of them tried to team up with tecsys because it is not their native environment where they developed competences over several years. But we see there a much bigger opportunity: Network and Security companies in our days have difficulties in adapting to the virtualized age because this changes all the rules. There is no future to protect end devices with expensive old fashion technologies. Based on VDI concepts the strategy change provides a much better solution. The same classical approach is used today everywhere by protecting via a physical firewall virtual machines or installing anti-virus solutions inside the virtual machines and not on the hypervisor. Here we see the added value and the advantage of tecsys compared to our competition and also new partners like for example Trend Micro.

ITnation: These are some very interesting thoughts. So finally how to you see the IT from yesterday facing the challenges of the IT from tomorrow?

 

mmo: This is one of the most interesting question in our days. We see the IT of the past as technology driven. IT was nothing more than a cost center to the business, spending time and money trying to meet existing business demands. The have been always over subscribed, under budgeted and under constant pressure to keep the lights on. IT has never enough resources to focus on improving internal operations or aligning with the business that it serves. The structure of the IT was mainly defined based on different technologies while they concentrated more on “Server management” instead of “Service Management” and finally financial transparency was always difficult. Not every IT would commit to those statements but most of them find themselves back somewhere. Now all these are Just Symptoms. We believe that IT is not structured to deliver its services, in a way that is aligned with the way that the business itself delivers services. We see this as the fundamental issue and that is not good enough for the future. So how would a state of art IT could be described today? IT would be a real business partner by helping the business to achieve its financial and performance objectives. IT would be a service-oriented line of business, focused on delivering business value. It’s Structure and operating model are defined in context of the business. In fact a state of the art IT department would run IT like a business by becoming anInternal Cloud service provider. All those services are defined and invoiced based on SLAs. The consumer knows exactly what he pays for and can at any time measure the quality of the service provided to him. To provide those services IT can choose from rich service portfolio based on worldwide competition and offered in the external cloud. All internal IT services will be in the long run under pressure from external cloud services. In the long run a market protection against external cloud services will be unfeasible. At the end internal Infrastructure services make only sense if external building blocks are not competitive. Now the goal is not to provide horror scenarios about the IT of the future but we strongly believe that IT has to be prepared for this transformation and to get there we defined some basic steps: Any IT has to face the challenge to become a provider of internal cloud services. Most of them have this already somewhere on their roadmap. IT has to understand that it is essential to most business processes but does not end in it selves. IT needs to see services in the same way as their business/customers/partners see them. The service catalog and service portfolio become the most important values for IT. This is what their offer to the business even if they are in the future partly rely on building blocks provided by the external cloud. ITSM and BSM are the key methodologies to provide those services to the business. And finally IT needs to be open to integrate external cloud services to remain competitive. We believe that we can help our customers finding their roadmap in their IT transformation. This is where all our product and services come together in one single vision.

ITnation: Thanks you very much!

Fba, mmo: Thank you.