Hemel Hempstead, UK, 1 October, 2012: Bull has announced the appointment of Andrew Carr as its new chief executive officer for the UK and Ireland. Carr, who takes over the role on October 1, was previously the company’s sales and marketing director. In his new post, he will spearhead Bull’s drive to become a high performance organisation, a transition he helped kick-start last year. 

To drive this vision, Carr will be launching a new Bull 3.0 programme which is designed to achieve a step-change in the market perception of Bull and the way that the company engages with customers, partners and employees.

“In terms of solutions, we will strengthen our focus on our three key propositions: cloud and managed services; information management, including big data storage and advisory services, and high-performance computing (HPC),” says Carr. “Our success so far has been based on a relentless focus on these three technologies which are significant growth areas and are directly linked to enabling our customers to innovate, reduce their cost of ownership and deliver higher quality services to their customers.”

HPC has been an area of particularly dynamic growth, with successes already achieved with the likes of the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC), Liverpool University and Wirth Engineering, and Carr plans to strengthen Bull’s focus on this area still further to drive greater market share.

In line with this, Carr plans to bring on board “the high-performance management team of the future” by introducing two new employee development programmes. The first targeted at graduates and initially focused on the sales, HR and finance functions, aims to encourage recruits to question current approaches, challenge the status quo and look at introducing new ways of working.  

In tandem, Bull is launching Pamplona, a bespoke management development programme, which will take 20 high potential employees or managers in the UK and Ireland and run 12 business focused modules for them, designed to give them the right skills and the right platforms to transform them into tomorrow’s senior managers.    

“We are looking for these employees to become advocates for Bull 3.0 and ‘cascade’ this enthusiasm throughout the organisation. In turn, this will help ensure we have robust succession planning in place and develop a motivated high performance organisation,” adds Carr.  

The new programme looks to build on the success already achieved by Bull’s business transformation process in which Carr has been instrumental in driving since joining the company in 2011. Bull 2.0 created an internal employee forum designed to share the company’s business strategy and objectives with them; give them a voice to communicate with the management team and get them engaged with the company’s process of business transformation. It also focused on redeveloping relationships with key strategic partners including EMC with whom Bull has worked to develop cloud-based environments that were flexible, adaptable and delivered real business value.         

“Bull 2.0 was all about motivating employees and motivating customers to engage with Bull as a partner,” says Carr, “and ensuring that the culture we put in place fostered trust, integrity and a ‘customer first’ focus.“What the new high performance organisation will do is raise this up a level to ensure we are creating propositions that customers want to buy and that are based on what the market wants rather than being defined by what our capability is. This makes it much more relevant to the markets that we choose to focus on. “         

Carr has been sales and marketing director, Bull UK & Ireland since April 2011. Previously, he was executive sales director for ComputerLand UK PLC, responsible for developing its managed services and major account management propositions in addition to having overall responsibility for marketing and pre-sales. ComputerLand was acquired by The Capita Group in March 2008.

Carr was made sales and marketing director for Outsourcing within Capita IT Services with responsibility for defining, externalising and marketing the Capita offering. Carr subsequently joined Sungard Public Sector, successfully closing a number of contracts and re-shaping the go-to-market strategy. In total, he has more than 15 years’ experience within the IT industry, primarily in sales and marketing roles.

About Bull, Architect of an Open World
Bull is an Information Technology company, dedicated to helping Corporations and Public Sector organisations optimise the architecture, operations and the financial return of their Information Systems and their mission-critical related businesses. Bull focuses on open and secure systems, and as such is the only European-based company offering expertise in all the key elements of the IT value chain. For more information visit: http://www.bull.co.uk or follow on Twitter @Bull_UK

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Chris Harris/Tom Webb
The Whiteoaks Consultancy
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Email: chrish@whiteoaks.co.uk