Landis siphons rival staff

Landis has returned to Computacenter for a second round of poaching after staff lamented the reseller's inability to harness its networking business.

The networking distributor has persuaded Mike Dennehy, head of the enterprise networking and business development division at Computacenter, to become northern regional manager. He handed in his resignation on 10 August.

Ed Lamb, senior consultant at Computacenter, took on a consultancy role at Landis at the beginning of the month.

Computacenter previously hit out at the distributor after it lost Andy Boosie, Bay Networks account manager and Shaun Thornber, Cisco account manager, to Landis last year (PC Dealer, 5 November 1997).

Roger Paul, managing director of Landis, admitted he had poached the staff and said: 'We will possibly be talking to a couple of other people at Computacenter in the future.'

He added: 'Dennehy wanted to move to Landis after trying to develop the networking business for a long time, but Computacenter is still seen as a worktop company.'

An industry source said: 'A year ago, things were shaky at Computacenter after setting up the networking division, but the core business is the desktop. Computacenter does not invest in networking and clients don't see it as a player in the market.'

The reseller was unavailable to comment on the departures but one source said: 'Computacenter does have issues with Landis - it sees poaching staff as negative.'

Last year Adam Austin, Computacenter's head of enterprise networking, said the reseller would be in contact with Landis regarding the first spate of defections. But Paul claimed to have had no contact with Austin regarding the matter.