OCC future hangs in the balance
Office Centre Central (OCC), the reseller-funded purchasing group, has gone into administrative receivership and ceased all trading.
Office Centre Central (OCC), the reseller-funded purchasing group, has gone into administrative receivership and ceased all trading.
Failure to secure a second round of corporate funding was the primary reason for the group's collapse, claimed managing director Bill Hill.
Financier the Royal Bank of Scotland called in accountancy firm BDO Stoy Hayward as administrative receiver at the end of last week.
Hill told CRN: "The group ran out of cash, end of story. We had trouble finding an investor and the City doesn't have an appetite for IT investment right now. We launched towards the end of last year and in hindsight it couldn't have been at a worse time."
OCC was founded last September and is co-owned by 47 resellers nationwide. It rebranded last month as Vision4group in what turned out to be a last-ditch attempt to win investors.
Hill said two parties have shown interest in purchasing the OCC trading name, but so far no official moves had been made. Techtel, brought in as part of the group's telecommunications initiative at the start of the year, will not be part of any potential liquidation proceedings and could become an independent organisation.
Nitin Joshi, a director at credit-insolvency specialist Panell Kerr Forster, said he expected potential bidders to come forward in the next few weeks, otherwise OCC would be liquidated. Joshi added that he had been contacted by a number of OCC suppliers who were interested in what would happen to the reseller members of OCC.
Nat Hart, managing director of OCC partner Landscape, and a non-executive director at OCC, said members should not be affected too badly. "OCC was a good idea, and I am terribly disappointed the venture did not work.""I have a firm belief a leaner, fitter version of this concept will arise from this," he adeed. "Resellers need something like it to help them source products in what right now are very hard economic conditions."
Edward Blackwell, of BDO Stoy Hayward, said it was still "early days" and too soon to say what would happen to OCC.