Madrid-based Coritel SL, the computing services subsidiary of Andersen Consulting, has been present in Spain since 1984, currently employs 940 staff and reported turnover up 11% at $58.8m for fiscal 1994. In an interview with Computing Espana, Coritel’s managing director, Jose Luis Manzanares Blanch, commented that the services market was entering a phase of greater complexity, due to the arrival of multimedia technology, the information highways and the progress of client-server architecture. In his opinion, this complexity is leading to higher development costs, since the user is chasing more added value and this has its price. With the fall in margins that has occurred over the last three years, Manzanares is convinced that fewer and fewer companies will survive. Coritel, however, is falling into line with the Gartner Group’s predictions for the services market, increasing its business by around 10% a year. Turnover of some $66m is foreseen for the current fiscal year. Manzanares appeared unconcerned about the traditional hardware and software companies seeking a slice of the services cake as long as we, despite the fierce competition, continue to increase business as we are doing. The bulk of Coritel’s business comes from the financial sector – some 50%, but this proportion will gradually decrease to the benefit of the Public Administration and Services sector (currently 30%) and Industry and Distribution (20%).
Software Factory
Manzanares refutes the theory that the government spends little on services, but admits that it is difficult to know how much of an investment it makes, since it does not break down its spending by areas of activity. Coritel has three lines of attack: systems development, Software Factory and applications management and maintenance. The company’s marketing machinery is currently giving the Software Factory the highest profile. The avowed philosophy of this line of business is to apply criteria of high productivity and quality to the area of systems design and development. A key aspect here is the concept of re-usability: The term embraces a series of techniques that enable know-how to be re-used, in order to create a higher quality product in less time and at a lower cost. Through the re-use of architectures and the employment of complex productivity tools, traditional project development valuations have been cut by up to 25%, Manzanares claimed. The Software Factory business unit completed 17 projects last year, in which more than 300 staff were involved. The managing director also explained that Coritel had recently redesigned its facilities management division, transferring this business to a new unit of Andersen Consulting by the name of Business Process Management, and adding to the staff of 130 who had formed part of this division at Coritel. Manzanares pledged the creation of a new approach focused on strategic outsourcing, rather than on the simple commitment to manage computing resources. He declared that a lot of confusion had arisen in this area, because many companies only provide facilities management for mainframe environments, applying criteria that are invalid for client-server working. Finally, he confirmed his firm’s vocational commitment to services: Our objective is to become leaders in the development, management and maintenance of systems – we are not interested in becoming involved in consultancy.
