Phoenix signs £40m+ deskside support deal

Phoenix IT has signed a five year contract with “one of the major Global IT Services providers” to provide deskside support services for their UK clients and for its own UK operations. Phoenix will also take on c180 staff as part of the deal. Over a period of five years from December 2012 the deal is expected to generate in excess of £40m.

The move follows a trend amongst the large IT services companies for offloading their field-based capabilities to reduce costs. Over the years many have struggled to find a balance between delivering crucial deskside and onsite services, and the cost of maintaining a sizeable field engineering group. Just last month we revealed that Fujitsu’s current approach to the conundrum involved increasing rather than reducing its field staff capabilities (see Fujitsu to create 300 new support services jobs).

While this deal is good news for Phoenix, it has been an unsettling period generally for the firm, which has lost its CEO (see Courtley (and Deloitte) exit Phoenix) and discovered “the mis-statement of a number of accounting balances” at Servo, one of its subsidiaries (see Phoenix uncovers accounting hole at Servo). We await with interest its full-year results due this Thursday.