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TWST: Can we set the context with a brief introduction to Synstar (london:SYN.L)?

Mr. Vaughan: Synstar is a European IT services organization. About half of our business is in the UK and then we deal in France, Germany, Benelux, Spain and Ireland. Our business is about computer infrastructures so we do hardware maintenance, networks, managed services, desktop sort of things. We also have a big storage business providing storage solutions for customers. And then we do disaster recovery and business continuity. So we cover the whole infrastructure side of the computing world as opposed to consulting and application software, which are areas we don’t do.

TWST: Are you still targeting the blue chips? The last time we spoke you had a very broad and top shelf customer base?

Mr. Vaughan: Yes, that I think is very much our key asset. Our customer base is remarkable. We are very big in financial services; we have all the automotive manufacturers as customers, from Porsche to Ford, Jaguar, BMW, Mercedes and so on. We have a good presence in all of the private sector segments and a reasonable business in public sector. We are actually more established in private sector than public sector. Interestingly, about 25% of our revenue actually comes from other IT companies. We are big provider of maintenance services to CSC who are our biggest customer and we also have EDS and Captor and so on as our customers.

TWST: When you look at your competition what do you think is giving you an edge today?

Mr. Vaughan: We have very high customer satisfaction. It’s the strongest in the industry and that flows through into the renewal rate, which is in the high 80%, which is very high for our industry, bearing in mind that 75% of our business is on long term contract. So it is very important to be able to make sure we renew those contracts however often it is seen -- some of them are annual, some of them are every 3-5 years. With that base of customer satisfaction, we get the opportunity to talk to them about our other services. So the thing that we have really been pushing to the floor in the last year is the message “You may know Synstar for the one thing you buy from us, but make sure that you know the other things that we can do.” And they actually fit quite well with each other; they are all about the computer infrastructure. Therefore, if you buy maintenance, you may also be able to buy network services from us and so on. It’s a well matched set of services.

TWST: Is it more a focus today then on cross selling opportunities to the current customer base rather than going out there and trying to add more customers first and foremost?

Mr. Vaughan: That’s the strategy: 2000 customers, many of them blue chips, most of them buying one thing from us in one place. Here is an idea - let’s try to sell them two or three things or, where they operate in more than one country, let’s sell services to them in each of those countries. Let’s make something of my European presence rather than just dealing with them in one place.