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TWST: Could we start with an introduction to Getronics (Amsterdam:GTN.AS), including a brief historical sketch?

Mr Silvius: Getronics originated from a company that was founded over 100 years ago. But you could say the Company re-started in 1983 as a management buy-out -- one of the first ones in Holland in fact. In 1985, it went public and at this time was considered mostly an infrastructure business, but rapidly developing a complete portfolio of services, and providing ICT solutions to our customers. Today, we have two types of activities. One is infrastructure solutions and services – the integration and management of ICT infrastructures such as, networks. The second activity is business solutions and consulting, which includes the IT consulting.

TWST: I’d like to concentrate on the latter division, if we could, and specifically the IT consulting space. Can you comment further on how this component evolved and your activities here?

Mr Silvius: Yes, the consulting activity in the Netherlands originated in fact from a number of companies that were working under their own label. We put it together to add more power under the Getronics label. And one of the ideas behind it was that until a few years ago as a consultant it was required that you had some level of independence. We feel, however, that the marketplace for consulting has changed and it is not so much independence that is asked now, it’s more the ability to execute or being able to deliver both the consulting part and a solution, whether it is an ICT solution, a training solution or whatever. So that gave us the reason for putting our consulting activities under the Getronics brand. We founded the specific Dutch consulting business three years ago and we are now present all over the world with consulting clusters in Italy, Spain, UK, United States and the Netherlands.

TWST: What are some of the key trends and developments you are seeing in the IT consulting space today?

Mr Silvius: I think the consulting industries are having some interesting times at this moment because these blue chip companies are all looking at how to better manage their costs or maybe also decrease their costs. They are also thinking about having less business consultants -- not only thinking about it, but actually doing it. So you are seeing that the whole consulting industry is now also focusing a little bit more on the medium size company because there’s still a market there. Maybe the sales are not that high as you’d like to have, but the market itself is fairly open to consulting.

TWST: What stands out to you as the biggest opportunity for Getronics?

Mr Silvius: ICT is still a very powerful product and we try to address basically two things. One, spending less costs on the housekeeping of your IT. Housekeeping meaning the things you already have and just need to maintain and keep in good condition; for example, your current application or the current infrastructure. It has to be done, but you want to do it with as little cost as possible. The things you have to do with little cost as possible. In this area, we can play a fabulous role. I mean, we have business cases where when we take out a number of extras we can actually decrease the cost for our customers. Another area is the IT innovation area where you do new things with IT and there is a huge opportunity to decrease other costs through IT. We have to make this very clear that there are good opportunities for IT to optimize business processes.