We’re not playing with money

Trade

Safe hands: PFH boss Paul Hourican dismisses takeover talk

Redstone Technology was one of a number of potential PFH acquisition targets in the weeks ahead of the swoop on the ultimate prize. However, in an interview with Irish Computer, PFH chief executive Paul Hourican ruled out any more takeovers in the near future.

Instead, Hourican stressed that the company was being careful with its money, despite having made two acquisitions in six months, and dispelled any suggestion that PFH was ‘doing a Calyx’.

“We’re not playing with money,” Hourican said. “We’ve been in business for 25 years. This is a long-time play which is reflected in the strength of our balance sheet. We’re a frugal organisation.”

The company is in the process of putting together integration teams to handle the assimilation of Redstone Technology into the PFH structure.

Hourican said that, as with the purchase of the Irish operation of Siemens Enterprise Communications last May, there “was not a huge overlap” between the two businesses. He said they “didn’t seem to cross paths too much” as Redstone was strong in enterprise servers and storage “where we tend not to play”.

Hourican predicted that PFH would end up with three distinct parts to its business, ranging from Redstone as the high-end enterprise ILM storage division, PFH aiming from the mid-market to the high-end and the former Siemens Enterprise Communications business focused on data networking, voice and IP telephony.

He believed the opportunities for the sales force to cross-sell over the three businesses could be significant if the “good wins” it has experienced from cross-selling between the PFH and Siemens customer bases are anything to go by.

Addressing the suggestion that PFH might pursue other acquisitions in the near future, Hourican replied: “No, no. The next two months are going to be very busy anyway. It’s the busiest time of the year.”

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