Channel Focus: Vin Murria

Advice Will Garside 2010-08-25 13:04

Over the last 23 years, business woman and IT entrepreneur Vin Murria has established quite a track record. She has been involved in around 40 mergers, acquisitions or sizable equity investments, and her navigation around economic downturns has not only helped her, but many channel partners, turn a profit.

Murria spent her formative years in the IT industry at Kewill Systems, helping to bring ERP, logistics and supply chain systems into the UK. Following that, a spell as CEO at Computer Software Group saw a four-year period of acquiring good companies and improving them, ultimately resulting in the sale of the enlarged group to Hellman & Friedman, the private equity group, for £500m.

Her latest venture, Advanced Computer Software Plc (ASW) has also been acquisitive, picking up several leading UK tech companies focusing on accounting software, document management, ERP and systems and services designed for the NHS.
Tough market
Selling into the NHS and to GPs is a tough market to crack, as Murria will be the first to admit. “It is a very difficult market – you either make it or you don’t and the lead time to sale is long,” she explains. “But once you get the relationships established, it’s OK.”

The acquisition strategy was executed precisely to deliver a group of interlocking companies that deliver holistic software and services from the doctor’s surgery right through to the human resources department of the largest trust hospitals or contract nursing agencies.

The timing of Advanced, which has only been up and running for two years, is also eerily precognitive. With much larger rivals such as BT, Accenture and CSC having won portions of the UK’s largest ever IT project in The NHS National Programme for IT, the prospects for smaller technology companies to muscle their way into the NHS looked bleak. However, the Programme has proved disastrous, with costs spiralling from an estimated £2.3bn over three years to a likely cost of £10bn to £15bn over ten years. Many of the original backslapping “winners” have quietly sloped off to let others pick up the mess, damaging many reputations within the health service IT community.

Murria is not overly surprised. “There was naivety around healthcare,” she comments. “Why would anybody think that a single product could handle such a complex market? Each layer [of the NHS] has a different set of requirements.”
Too many cooks
Another impediment to the success of vendors like Advanced was the focus of the outgoing Labour government on centralised management around IT procurement through Primary Care Trusts. Although not a bad idea, the structure of the PCTs swayed them towards more marquee projects that had the same IT giants that had won the national programme rubbing their hands in glee.

“There were too many cooks,” believes Murria. “The willingness was there but change happens all the time and they [BT, CSC, Fujitsu et al] went through a challenging time to try and keep up with the individual requirements.” In her view, the consortia were always going to find that the intricacies of the NHS would make it difficult to succeed.

However the PCTs are soon to be gone, and the new Coalition Government plans to devolve power back down to grass root level with local GPs forming regional groupings. This localisation plays right into the hands of channel-focused suppliers with a network of local partners.

With a multi-billion pound budget about to fall into the laps of around 10,000 GPS, many will form local foundations to simplify procurement and reduce the cost of IT service delivery. This new community, which Murria estimates will be around 500 organisations, offers a significant and consistent revenue stream for vendors and partners aligned to deliver the right back office systems – tailored for the individual needs of these local communities.