The new incarnation of Misco has opened its doors after UK Computer Group announced it had bought the rights to the name last month.
For those who came in late, Misco went bust in 2017. Still based in Wellingborough, the outfit has Dell EMC, Lenovo, Acer and HP among its vendor partners.
Adam Muir, director of product management at Misco, said the company had strong relationships with most of the market-leading vendors and distributors across the channel.
Computacenter has snapped up Misco’s last-remaining European subsidiary in Amstelveen in Holland.
Misco Solutions employs around 200 staff and booked revenues of €134 million last year.
Computacenter claiming to have covered the cost of the transaction using existing cash resources, which presumably means breaking into the piggy bank and looking down the back of the sofa.
The sale went through three months of negotiations and Centralpoint and Bechtle were in the frame to buy the outfit before Computacenter.
The deal marks Computacenter’s first direct presence in the Holland and should give a boost to its Benelux business.
Computacenter CEO Mike Norris said: “While we mainly focus on organic growth, we are interested in acquisition opportunities which either enable us to enter new markets or enhance our services and solutions for our customers. The Netherlands is an adjacent European market for us and we are excited by the opportunity to build the long-term trust of government organisations and some of Europe’s largest companies headquartered there. Our direct local presence in the Netherlands will also allow us to enhance our support to a number of Computacenter’s largest international clients for whom this is a key location.”
Misco’s Dutch arm is the company’s last-standing subsidiary on the continent following the collapse of Misco UK in October 2017, which preceded subsequent closures across Europe.
Misco UK’s old building on the banks of the River Clyde in Inverclyde has been sold off in a £1.1 million deal.
Computer reseller Misco UK went tits up last year and has fallen into administration. The purchase by the Easdale brothers, who own McGill’s Bus Service, takes its recent property investments to more than £5 million.
The Inverclyde warehouse, located in the west end of the town adjacent to Royal Bank of Scotland’s mortgage processing centre, is to be marketed for lease by agents Breck Sutherland within the next few months.
Misco maked a huge mistake by shifting its “high level customer service agents” from the UK to Hungary. A report into the company collapse said that the large majority of back-office functions were moved to a sister company in Hungary, this included its high level customer service agents. This meant the loss of the UK-based customer service team with expert knowledge and a downturn in sales.
In the end the tax man forced the shut down of the whole operation after the company could not flog itself off.
Online retailer Ebuyer.com is releasing more services aimed squarely at the corporate customer.
Dubbed Ebuyer ProServices, it provides corporate customers with managed IT and cloud computing systems and online and telephone consultancy.
The move is part of a cunning plan to chart a growth in demand for business devices with an increasing number of previously well-known online consumer players while bolstering Ebuyer revenues by entering the B2B space.
As well as delivering a range of managed services the firm is also looking to help meet one of the main challenges from customers, around security. The service will deliver protection against malware, DDOS and other malicious attacks.
Ebuyer’s IT Director, Paul Lyons, said that the launch of the latest initiative should appeal to existing customers as well as give the firm the chance to strike some fresh relationships.
“We are excited to launch our new service. Our team is looking forward to helping new and existing customers increase their organisations productivity and online security with our bespoke systems”, he said.
Misco’s shock collapse after nearly 30 years has left the industry shocked.
A few years ago Misco had revenues north of £300 million operating profits of over £10 million and over 600 staff. It was still growing when it opened new offices in Weybridge in 2013.
However, four years later, the Misco UK name abruptly vanished from view and a last-minute rescue attempt to keep the business afloat in a reduced form fell through.
Its collapse comes seven months after a new management team, backed by Hilco Capital, bought the UK and European business from long-time parent Systemax.
But the rot had set in before the new team led by Alan Cantwell arrived and it was probably too late to fix what appears to have been management problems. Especially as its rivals such as Computacenter appear to be doing well.
Its rivals appear to be thinking that the spiralling death of Misco was an isolated case for the channel.
Misco UK’s operating losses widened to over £8 million in the year before the change in ownership. Systemax simply gave up and sold it. The feeling is that broadline, commodity distribution was dying, no one is making money from it and Misco was tried to reform too late.
Credit insurers began cutting their exposure to Misco and distributors became unwilling to deal with the reseller, with just a few supporting the business until recently.
Misco also received a winding-up petition from HMRC over unpaid VAT, leaving it with no “viable option other than to seek the protection of administration”.
The National Desktop and Notebook Agreement (NDNA) is now live with resellers awarded spots as indirect partners for a host of PC vendors.
Managed by London Universities Purchasing Consortium, the four year agreement will see Academia, DTP and Misco provide desktops and mobile devices from Acer, Fujitsu, HP Inc, Lenovo and Toshiba. Dell will take all its business direct.
The 11 resellers on the framework are: Academia, Bechtle, CDW, DTP, European Electronique, Getech, Insight, Misco, SCC, Stone and XMA. Stone Computers will also supply its own devices direct to customers, while XMA will supply its Viglen brand.
The framework is broken up into three lots: Lot 1 is for desktops, Lot 2 is for notebooks and mobile devices, while Lot 3 is a “one-stop shop” for both categories.
The value of the NDNA is between £400 million and £440 million, which is much bigger than its predecessor’s £310 million.
One thing is noticeable. Samsung is no longer involved, while Fujitsu is brought in on Lot 2. Softcat is a notable reseller absentee, having previously been in all three Lots with Dell and Lenovo.
Inverclyde MP Ronnie Cowan has slammed Misco’s Scotland warehouse closure.
Cowan posted on Twitter that he was meeting with Scottish government agency Scottish Enterprise to discuss the issue – while also contacting skills and training agency Skills Development Scotland.
Misco wants to shut its Greenock warehouse at the end of the year, with all 65 warehouse staff set to be made redundant.
In other social media posts, the Scottish Labour Party’s political director Martin McCluskey criticised Misco bosses for the redundancies, claiming their rationale “doesn’t show much imagination about how [the] facility could be re-used to save jobs”.
Misco has since responded to Cowan and McCluskey on Twitter, offering them the chance to speak with the company.
A spokesperson from Cowan’s office said the MP is due to speak him either today or tomorrow, while McCluskey had not responded to CRN’s request for comment.
The company said the decision had been made to shut down the warehouse because it was no longer economic. It was set up to ship 6,000 parcels a day and only does 400 and 500 parcels.
Misco is working with the Scottish agency PACE [Partnership Action for Continuous Employment], a Scottish Government initiative designed to help people into a new job, he added.
Reseller Misco is to close its UK warehouse at the end of the year.
The outfit said that the rise of drop-shipping has decimated its usage and made it inefficient. Instead it had a cunning plan to save a minimum of £1.5 million a year by outsourcing its warehouse functions to a third-party logistics provider.
Misco’s CEO Alan Cantwell confirmed that all 65 warehouse staff at the 80,000 sq ft location will be collecting their p45s and pink slips.
The existing 24 sales staff will relocate to a new office nearby in Q1 of 2018, he said.
Cantwell led a management buy-in of Misco in March and the move is part of the new team’s efforts to return it to break even after group losses reached about £16 million last year.
Some 105 UK staff have already left the business under a recent sales and marketing restructure, while headcount at Misco’s Budapest shared service centre has also been slashed from 340 to 200.
The logistics centre there was set up to ship 6,000 parcels daily, and at present the company is only shipping between 400 and 500. This was mostly because it is drop shipping pretty much everything and most parcels now go straight from logistics through to the clients.
Misco is in the throes of negotiating a contract with a third-party logistics provider which will take over the functions before Christmas. Its shortlist has been whittled down to two, with a decision set to be made in the next week.
A quarter of UK adults have been scammed online in the past, according to research conducted by the supplier Misco.
Apparently only a third can tell if an email is real or not, which might be the main problem.
In light of recent high-profile cyberattacks, Misco tested the nation’s ability to spot whether an email is real or fake. The research used screenshots of both real and fake emails and texts from banks, online money transfer services and Apple’s iCloud.
When asked to identify which of two near-identical emails – one real, one fake – was a genuine online account statement update from a bank account, 12 percent were fooled by the phishing email, believing it to be legitimate.
Those aged 16 to 24 were twice as likely to be duped, with 25 percent of this age group believing the fake email was genuine. Sixty-one per cent believed both to be fake, even though one was authentic.
Only 60 per cent of those surveyed could correctly identify another fake phishing email, this time a supposed security update from a bank. Sixteen percent believed the email to be authentic, while 24 percent admitted they were unsure as to whether it was real.
Afsar Chaudhury, Misco practice lead for network and security at Misco said: “We live in a digital age, where everything from our boarding passes to our bank accounts are accessed online. This makes it easier for hackers to gain access to our details, and this is shown in the increasing level of sophistication that goes into phishing emails.”
Chaudhury advised people to look out for certain clues, such as poor spelling or grammar, and high levels of impersonalisation to prevent phishing attempts.
“Services will never ask you to enter your details through a message, so avoid clicking those links or sending personal information in a message. We recommend using a different, secure password for each account you hold and changing them regularly, as this makes it harder for your accounts to be hacked. Regularly updating the security software on your computer can also stop any malware in its tracks, in case you do accidentally click through on a phishing link.”
XMA has appointed former Insight and Misco vice president Tony Brooker as its new UK corporate sales director.
Brooker left Misco in February and will be a key part of XMA’s moves to bolster its corporate sector business as it tried to expand beyond its traditional public sector clients.
Before working for Misco Brooker worked for Insight, then SCC and then back to Insight.
XMA has always been renowned in the public sector, mostly in education. However it has been quietly developing its corporate space profile and the plan is to grow that in the next six to 12 months across the four locations.
XMA’s corporate team currently accounts for just over 20 percent of XMA’s total business, according to sales and marketing director Ian Cunningham, who harbours ambitions to have a 50/50 profit split between public and private business in three years’ time.
Brooker said the size of the corporate team will be expanded, but it is unclear if the team will be dispersed across the reseller’s offices in Glasgow, Halifax, Nottingham and St Albans – or based in one location. He also didn’t rule out opening “a fifth or sixth” office down the line.
XMA also recently head-hunted Andy Wright from SCC and Kelvin Lee from the Crown Commercial Service,
In its most recent financial report XMA recorded a year-on-year revenue jump of 52.6 percent for the 12 months ending 31 December 2016, up to £358.5 million.
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