Volante redundancies overstated says Penman

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 07 February 2006 01:53

IT People - Enterprise

Volante CEO Ian Penman has finally spoken out against his anonymous critics, refuting redundancy figures that have been alleged and restating reasons behind the company's strategy of moving away from products and towards IT services.

According to Mr Penman, there is no truth to the rumour circulated by the anonymous group called save Volante Group (SVG) that there have been 570 redundancies during his reign as CEO. "That’s a wildly overstated number. We do have less people than we did have this time last year and that is intentional, but I’m not prepared to go into detail," said Mr Penman.

Mr Penman also refuted suggestions that his team had no credible growth strategy other than redundancies going forward.

"Redundancy is only part of our program to streamline the organization for growth. The focus is new systems and processes, management reporting systems and the like. Our business is undergoing a transformation away from reliance on a relatively lumpy products business toward IT services where there is a high component of predictable and recurrent annuity style income.
IT services contracts are also often the gateway to additional projects and product sales. Our aim is to develop a higher quality earnings profile," he said.

"Product Solutions is and will remain a very important part of our future plans although, as IT Services grows, the product business will account for a smaller part of overall earnings. In most cases our services customers also expect us to provide hardware and software as part of the solution."

According to Mr Penman, the feedback he is getting throughout the organisation suggests that employees are buoyed by the progress Volante is making.