Phoenix to kill ICM brand in major reshuffle

Services giant reshapes company into five business units, with functions centralised, ChannelWeb learns

Phoenix IT Group is doing away with its ICM brand and streamlining the company into five units with business functions pooled into central hubs, ChannelWeb has learnt.

According to an internal memo from Phoenix chief executive David Courtley, seen by ChannelWeb, the firm is to be organised into five "customer-facing business units", each of which will contain "the appropriate sales, pre-sales, account and service management resources". The five units will focus on: hosting, business continuity, telecommunications, systems integration (SI) and managed services.

Martin O'Donnell takes charge of the hosting division, while Mike Osborne leads business continuity and Phil Walter will head the telecoms arm. Former Damovo managing director Nick Dean has joined Phoenix, and will lead the managed services arm. John Hall serves as the acting head of the SI division.

Hall will also serve as group-wide head of sales and marketing, and marketing operations, which will be integrated across all units, will report to him. Finance, HR and commercial functions are also to be centralised, with teams being led by Steven Clutton, Virginia Rothwell and John Craig, respectively.

Operational functions have been reorganised into seven "capability units, managed horizontally across the company". Each unit will be "responsible for cost management, productivity and service delivery" and will report to a head of operations, a role being filled on an interim basis by telecoms boss Phil Walter.

Networks operations are led by Paul Dean, and John Mills oversees business continuity, datacentre and hosting. Professional services is managed by Rob Lockwood, and Bob Probets will head up field operations, while Ritchie Blake is the boss of logistics operations. Services management operations are led by Stuart Chapman, procurement and vendor management by Stuart Dickinson, and the head of service development is yet to be finalised.

Courtley outlines that he is working with business unit, functional and operational leaders towards the goal of finalising all appointments by 16 December. The new-look Phoenix organisation is set for a formal launch on 6 January.

The phasing out of the ICM name is the death knell for the services giant's end user brands. Earlier this year, its Servo business unit was merged into ICM.

In its last set of annual results before ICM and Servo were merged on 4 April, Phoenix IT Group turned over more than £270m for the year to 31 March 2011. Its flagship third-party services arm, Phoenix IT Services, saw revenue grow 13.1 per cent annually to £117.9m, with underlying operating profit rising 2.2 per cent £16.7m.

Servo's FY11 sales grew 11 per cent to £98.2m, with operational profit growing 2.6 per cent to £8.2m, while ICM's revenue rose 4.4 per cent to £55.5m, with profit up 8.5 per cent to £14.4m.

Phoenix was unavailable for comment as ChannelWeb went to press.