Creating Profit Through Alliances - business models for collaboration E-book | Page 43

physical distribution, and in case of services the costs
of matters such as quality inspections and idle
time/unused hours of personnel.
If two businesses decide to collaborate in their
offering, this yields even more value for the
customer. Provided all is specified properly, it offers
the customer a contractual guarantee that the two
firms' products or services are compatible, and that
he is saved from having to coordinate the delivery.
He is furthermore purchasing from a larger entity,
which offers greater delivery assurance. This may
prompt the collaborating firms to increase the prices,
or it can enable them to bid on orders that would
otherwise be beyond reach.
Here again, the alternative is to calculate what a
company would have to do in order to offer the
entire product, if at all feasible. In purchasing and

reselling part of the offer, the company must either
run greater risks, or must pay a higher price to cover
those risks. Moreover, such a construction often lays
claim to working capital, since suppliers generally
wish to be paid for their part before the customer
pays for the whole.
Determining the value of collaborative offering is
generally independent of the chosen legal
framework. It can be done through contractual
collaboration, or in the form of a new legal entity.
Chapter 5 will look at this more closely. The most
important variance in calculating the value concerns
the risk of having to pay a substantial customer claim,
whether or not jointly with the other partners.
However, under normal circumstances this risk ought
not to dominate the scenario when entering into
collaboration.

Global Workspace Alliance
Getronics is one of the largest IT service providers in
Europe and has been part of the telecom operator
KPN since 2007. It was split off from Geveke
Electronics and taken to the Dutch stock exchange by
Ton Risseeuw in 1983 and grew rapidly in the
nineties through various acquisitions. In 2001
Getronics took over Wang Global, but was affected
heavily by the collapse of the internet bubble and the
financial construction. Getronics shrank from 35,000
employees in 35 countries to 13,000 employees in 13
countries and tried to sell as many assets as possible,
to be able to keep on refinancing debt made to buy
Wang Global.
The rapid shrinkage had a major impact on servicing
large internationally active companies like Shell.
Competition with IBM, HP/EDS and CSC was strong,
and just having field service partners in countries

around the world was not a convincing way to
proceed. A new model was needed with better
aligned partners. Selling off a number of countrybased organisations, in a number of cases Getronics
retained a minority share. This made it attractive for
Getronics to collaborate with these specific
companies and to jointly strive for growth.
The alliance was formalised in early 2009, with
Compucom in the U.S., Service One Getronics in China,
Getronics Middle East, Tecnocom in Spain and South
America, NTT Data Getronics in Japan and APX in
France. The fact that companies in China, the Middle
East and Japan continued to carry „Getronics‟ in their
name was a provision made during the sale of the
companies, but aside from Getronics' minority share,
these are independent companies.

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