High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire-based Rapid Recall Ltd, owned by Metrologie UK, has opened a new office in central London, close to the Bank of England, to serve its City-based end user customers as well as major OEM customers and resellers. Some 25 customer service, sales, technical support and administrative staff will be based at the new office, which will be linked on-line to Rapid’s corporate computer system, based in High Wycombe. According to sales and marketing director, Frank Kemp, the new office has opened in response to increasing levels of service and support required by City-based customers. From this location he expects Rapid will serve banks, insurance companies, to diamond merchants and hotels. The new office will support the company’s range of computers, peripherals and software, and computer services. Certainly, Rapid seems to be broadening its horizons – where it used to refer to itself merely as a distribution company, today it would like to think of itself as a leading networking, connectivity and office systems company. In what could be regarded as a further attempt by the company to loosen its dependency on large accounts from DEC, Rapid has announced its repositioning as a systems and software solutions provider. Following the finalisation of the company’s slow merger with Trinitec, also owned by Metrologie (CI No 1,482), a new value added sales force has been created for computer products and services in the UK. One of the new services to be offered by Rapid is a Health Care for LANS programme – the company sent out mailshots to its own customers and others from which it concluded there is a great demand, now that businesses are installing more complex computer networks, for a service that will analyse networking in firms and produce a list of recommendations for any improvements needed. Rapid sees its present strong point to be its ability to connect systems from a range of different suppliers, often running under different operating systems. Rapid Recall is currently working with software houses, and hardware suppliers including DEC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Compaq and Toshiba. Rapid has also increased its emphasis on Unix-based systems over the last year, focusing on the IBM RS/6000 and the DEC Ultrix products as well as Santa Cruz Unix running on Hewlett’s HP Vectra personal computers.
