The move suggests that the North American end of the business is for sale, although Bell Atlantic Corp strongly denies it, we wrote earlier this year after Bell Atlantic handed its 49% of the European ICL Sorbus third party maintenance joint venture over to ICL Plc (CI No 2,609). It’s a mug’s game denying such suggestions – you are only made to look foolish, a liar even, when the deal does go down, and on Wednesday, Bell Atlantic announced that it and Decision Servcom Inc, the one-time Decision Data Inc, had signed definitive agreement for the Horsham, Pennsylvania company to take over the Bell Atlantic Business Systems Services desktop-to-mainframe service subsidiary on undisclosed terms. The combined operations will, they claim, be the world’s largest third party maintenance provider with over $700m in annual turnover, 52,000 customers having machines installed at 170,000 sites, and over 6,000 employees.
