IRW Systems, the Paisley-based group created by Scottish IT guru Ian Warnock, has acquired smaller rival Unitech of Edinburgh to bring together two of Scotland's high-end software specialists.
The deal gives IRW its first base in the East of Scotland and a stronger presence in the South of England, where Unitech's owner Nigel Gibbons is already based. It adds clients such as BT and Heineken to IRW's list which includes NATO, the NHS, Schlumberger, Babcock and BAE Systems.
IRW, one of Scotland's largest independents, is halfway through a three-year plan to double turnover and create at least 30 new highly-skilled jobs. It has already grown the workforce from 26 to 45 since 2012, helped by the opening of an Aberdeen office,
Mr Warnock said turnover would immediately jump by a third to around £5m,
and the renamed IRW-Unitech would be retaining all staff and probably recruiting.
He said: "They are similar to us, well-established in Scotland and across the UK with very similar skill-sets and approach to delivering high-quality software to quite often blue-chip clients. We both have a lot of clients down south, and this creates extra resource to deliver more projects both nationally and in Scotland."
MrWarnock would not put a value on the deal but said he had been in discussions for several months with Mr Gibbons, who was now the combined group's client engagement director working mainly out of London.
He said there would now be probably six to nine months of consolidation, but went on: "I am keeping an eye on what is out there, and trying to line up the next way to try to grow the business further, and that might be South of the Border....it will now be easier to locate suitable candidates."
In September 2013 Mr Warnock said he hoped to grow the group's turnover to
to at least £5m and the workforce to around 70 within three years, with the focus on organic growth but also on potential acquisitions and strategic partnerships.
But he recruitment was a key issue in Scotland, he said this week. "Companies like Skyscanner and others are sucking a lot of talent out of the market-place. Some people want to work for bigger companies and you can't do much about that but it does become quite hard for smaller businesses.We are having to import talent."
MrWarnock, who sits on the advisory board to the University of the West of Scotland , said there was a need for more specialist technical training in Scottish graduate and postgraduate courses. He said currently graduates had "a long gestation time before they are at a a level to perform an ongoing role", and that further education was "not moving forward with the changes in technology that are out there".
He said Caledonian University had run very specialist courses for network engineers. "They suddenly flooded the market with all these people with networking skills and there weren't the jobs for them all, but they are not doing that in the areas we work in, the heavy software development."
Mr Warnock, 59, a former university lecturer and senior consultant at Strathclyde Institute, who has written two best-selling books on manufacturing excellence, added: "Business intelligence could be an extended module on some of the undergraduate courses, there is more and more demand in a significant growth area, but we have received graduates who have no experience of that and you are starting from ground zero."
The company's abbreviated accounts suggest a profit of around £156,000 last year but Mr Warnock said the profit margin was just under 15per cent. "We are doing farily well commercially and we want to continue that."
He said he was still in demand as a consultant, most recently to a major IT corporation in Greece, adding: "I do still like to get a little bit of outside mix, but IRW-Unitech is going to take bit of my time to get it fully merged."
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