Six staff go from Integ

Six staff at Sydney voice-and-data integrator Integ Communications have been laid off, in a drive for greater post-acquisition efficiencies.

Ian Poole, CEO at Integ, said six sales and service staff were made redundant yesterday, Thursday 5 February, leaving a total of 93 in its seven Australian offices.

The layoffs were partly to streamline the company following its recent acquisitions of emergency services specialist Trade Centre Products and Queensland data networking firm Lanlink.

'We don't like doing it. This is the first time we've done it at Integ, looking at how we can improve our services for customers,' Poole said.

He had not been told if all or any of the six had yet found other positions, he said, but the company would do its best to make sure all former employees were looked after.

No further staff cuts were expected. 'We never want to do any minor things here and there. It's always better to do it at the beginning of the year and at once. But you have to do what's best for the organisation,' he said.

Poole said a $1 million integration for financial services provider Tower Australia had been completed just before Christmas.

An anonymous tip-off to CRN had suggested that the layoffs were somehow connected with the completion of the Tower Australia deal.

However, Poole said there was definitely no connection, partly as that project hadn't required any changes to the company or different staffing needs in the first place.

'We had made those couple of acquisitions and we hadn't done any re-organisation of the company when we did those acquisitions,' Poole added. 'It's nothing to do with Tower.'

Poole said Integ was looking forward to a strong year in IP telephony applications and voice-over IP, LAN switching and security and was targeting staff resources to those areas.

'From our perspective, IP telephony is in major growth,' he said.

Integ, a subsidiary of ASX-listed IT services company UXC, had also recently added new vendors to bring its partner ranks up to 15, including Alcatel, Genesys, Pivotal CRM and M5, Poole said.