Maclean Computing in liquidation

The Companies Office says Waterstone Insolvency was appointed as liquidators on July 13, with the first liquidator report due on July 19.

Waterstone will take over the management and running of the business, including the handling of its assets.

It also has final say on whether Maclean will continue to trade, a decision likely to affect Maclean’s clients, which it claims on its website to include Hubbards, Les Mills International, Hyundai, and more than 100 other businesses.

The government’s Insolvency and Trustee Service says most businesses put into liquidation usually close down.

The future of Maclean’s 50 staff also looks precarious, as the liquidators will seek to reduce cost to best make returns for Maclean’s outstanding creditors.

Computerworld is seeking comment from Maclean and Waterstone.

Last year, Maclean announced that it was outsourcing its procurement business to Acquire, a move that CEO Chris Maclean at the time described as a "win-win for everyone".

“As our market, and our business matures, we are keen to focus our resources on the areas that offer customers the best return. Our core strength is in building and supporting Rock Solid IT foundations, not procurement, so this partnership delivers an improved service for customers and a tighter focus for ourselves,” he said at the time.

Back in 2010, after 16 years in business, Maclean unveiled a new logo and tagline, 'rock solid IT'.

“It reflects our core focus which is concentrating on the infrastructure and foundation side," said marketing manager Andrew Charlesworth at the time of the announcement. "The tagline suggests that if you have a solid foundation than you can build the rest of the business on top of that.”

In February this year, Maclean passed on its smaller customers to Belton IT. At the time, Maclean described the move as the second part of a two-part process, with the first being to pass procurement to Acquire. “The first phase of this strategy implementation was our decision to partner with Acquire for product procurement. Whilst clearly an important part of any relationship with customers, we don’t believe that procurement is a core part of our value proposition. We also believe that procurement (the transaction itself as opposed to the design) has been largely commoditised, which means the primary decision factor becomes price rather than the transaction service," said Maclean.