ICL's radical restructure starts with sell-off

NEWS ICL will hang on to its government services business and work in partnership with Anite on delivery of the software. The deal will affect ICL's Logical and Pericles product lines in the public sector area. Dave Denison, ICL's local government consultant, said the deal is in line with ICL's ongoing focus on services for modernising government, rather than selling applications. "We want to provide managed services of all kinds: outsourcing; ASP services - we don't want to sell software." The business to be sold is thought to have a turnover of tens of millions of pounds, but is not turning in a profit. Denison said: "We had used it in the past as a way to draw in IT services revenues, but that type of business has diminshed." Denison also said the partnership with Anite will actually see it widen the portfolio of local government products it could service. Anite will pay for the company with £5.13m in cash and the rest in Anite shares. Analysts say the move is in line with a renewed focus from ICL on its core IT services business, which will see more divestitures of businesses that fall outside this strict area. The news follows last week's announcement of a radical restructure of IT services delivery in ICL, now to be branded Infracare.