With significant increases in both pre-tax profit and turnover reported for 1989, Camberley, Surrey-based software, consultancy and project management company Admiral Computing Group Plc is quite justified in summarising its plans for the future with a pithy more of the same, as group marketing director Stuart Wild put it. Revenues from the defence sector, which Admiral targeted from its start-up in 1979, still account for around 40% of total turnover, which rose 42% to UKP16m for the year, with sales to the financial sector accounting for a third, and revenues from government projects making up 16%. Admiral has diversified considerably from its original role as a software house, and, although software development still makes up around a half of total business in all the sectors mentioned above, consultancy, project management and software evaluation and validation services have become increasingly important. A joint venture with High Integrity Systems, Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire to explore the possibilities of the Ada programming language has not really taken off, Wild admitted, despite the mandatory status of Ada for nearly all UK and NATO defence applications – there are presumably only so many defence contracts available, and the civilian sector has been slow to latch on to Ada. Other on-going projects include one in Portugal, with a team from Admiral’s Management Services division working on command control systems for NATO, while a small joint venture with the Singapore government is continuing to work on software quality assurance in the Pacific Rim for the Singapore Institute of Standards and Industrial Research. The software evaluation centre at Camberley is currently more involved in the validation of software for safety, rather than security, and is working on such projects as the validation of railway systems and of the reactor protection system at the Sizewell plant. As far as the project management side of the business is concerned, Wild concedes that contracts – mainly with the UK government – have been not too big, but have at least gained Admiral a higher profile. On the mergers and acquisitions front, Admiral is vague about whom it would like to acquire, saying that by necessity the decision to buy would be largely opportunistic, but one possible area it would like to get into would be management consultancy; more important, however, is that the acquisition fits in with what Admiral perceives as its corporate culture, which would be a company with a reputation for high quality. Asked whether Admiral itself was a possible target for a take-over, Wild argued that this was unlikely as long as co-founders Clay Brendish and Dr Ceri James maintained their 60% shareholding and a com mitment to independence. For the future, Admiral will continue to seek growth in its existing areas of business, as well as looking to develop the commerci al and industrial sectors. It is also hoping to supplement the architectures it currently supports including DEC and Tandem – with others, such as IBM.
