After months of indecision, ASX-listed network integrator Maxis has retained its contract with the NSW Department of Community Services (DOCS) as a subcontractor to outsourcing giant CSC.
Maxis director and chairman, Robin Devries, said the contract would be renewed for a further three years, however, the dollar value had been readjusted.
“The financial terms will be substantially the same to those applying in prior years,” Devries said.
The recently expired contract raked in more than $10 million a year for Maxis. This made the DOCS account the primary income source for the integrator. As recently as July 2002 there was concern that the contract would only be renewed for a six month period, if at all.
In the company’s 2002 financial report, then executive chairman, Vaz Hovanessian, said it was uncertain as to whether Maxis would be able to continue as a going concern if the CSC contract was not renewed.
In the current agreement CSC is leaving itself plenty of room to manoeuvre.
Devries said: “The extension will provide more flexibility than previously for CSC to vary the scope and breadth of the contract, including deleting certain services.”
Meanwhile, Maxis is consolidating its operations with Senteq, the IT integration company it bought in December last year from National Telecoms Group (NTG).
The buyout came just eight months after NTG bought Senteq.
Senteq CEO, Alex Lopez, would not disclose the sum paid for the business but said it was a pure cash purchase with no share exchange involved.
Maxis remains a reseller of NTG's telecommunications packages, but Lopez said that if NTG's recently announced restructure took more of a wholesale direction rather than maintaining a retail focus, this relationship might be scaled back.
With a combined workforce of 75-80 and an additional 40-odd contractors Maxis is looking for new, bigger, premises to house the two operations, having outgrown its offices in Artarmon and St Leonards in Sydney’s north.
