HPC specialist OCF undergoes MBO

Former operations director Russell Slack becomes MD under new ownership

Computing integrator OCF has undergone a management buyout (MBO) in order to bring "fresh blood" to the organisation according to newly-minted MD Russell Slack.

The MBO was led by former operations director Slack, Andrew Dean and Laurence Horrocks-Barlow and sees them acquire 100 per cent of the share capital from former owners Julian Fielden and Steve Reynolds.

OCF specialises in high-performance compute, data analytics and cloud. It counts Lenovo, NetApp and Huawei among its partners and has recently partnered with Dell EMC.

Horrocks-Barlow now becomes the technical director of OCF, while Dean will continue in his role in the sales team working with sales director Reynolds.

"I brought the offer to the table as I saw it as a natural progression for us," he told CRN.

"I've worked here for a long time and I know the guys very well. I thought that it was about time we moved the business forwards and brought some fresh blood in and allowed those guys to take their foot off the pedal somewhat."

Slack has worked at all levels of the business, coming in during the Christmas period over 20 years ago to assist in dropping systems boxes to customers.

Since then he has been fully trained as a systems engineer, working up to operations manager and now managing director.

Reynolds will remain as sales director at OCF and former MD Fielden will stay on as chairman of the company on a part-time basis.

Slack maintained that it will be "business as usual" for OCF for the foreseeable future, but that it will be considering new ideas for the business' long-term growth.

"We want to make sure that we continue to do exactly what we do today, so there's going to be no change there," he stated.

"We do have lots of innovative ideas from our technical team and from the sales team that we'd like to look at and that I'm excited about and that we're going to dig into and look at those for the future."