ICL post point-of-sale

ICL may be the grandfather of British IT, but yesterday it fell victim to exactly the same problems that face 90 per cent of dot-com start-ups - poor financial performance and a hostile stock market.

In September 1998, parent company Fujitsu confirmed plans for an ICL IPO on the London Stock Exchange. But subsequent operational losses of £69.7m in fiscal 1999 did nothing for that aim. Then the Nasdaq slide effectively killed it off.

After those setbacks it was inevitable that CEO Keith Todd would go. He'd been at ICL since the late 1980s as finance director, but was moved up to the top spot when the company's re-invention as a services firm had already started, and flotation was in the offing.

Now ebusiness is the primary goal rather than IPO, so Fujitsu has no need for moneyman Todd, and Todd isn't going to get his flotation money.

That's history now - turning a company with 21,000 staff from loss to profit is where it's at. If ebusiness is to be the way to do this, it needs to radically rebrand. No one currently talks of Sun and ICL in the same breath, and that's a problem.

To put itself at the heart of the dot-com world, it needs to do three things.

It needs to get some respected ecommerce technology, and fast - in short, it needs to get acquisitive.

It needs to shed its crusty 'preferred supplier to local government' image. That may have brought in the money in the mainframe-dominated 1970s, but some internet entrepreneurs hadn't even been born then.

And finally, it needs to use what it has - a strong base in retail. If it can translate all those point-of-sale system contracts into ebusiness deals, it's got a fighting chance.