Schools IT supplier RM swings to full year loss after sales dive Ailing specialist education IT supplier RM has admitted it reacted too slowly to government budget cuts in schools after revealing massive losses in fiscal 2011 ended 30 November. The firm posted a loss before tax of £23.4m for the 14 months to nOVEMBER 2011 – including restructuring costs and excess property provisions. This …
"Why don't schools just buy Dell, HP or someone else?"
Fair point, but there are reasons (I'm not saying they're good reasons :) You've got things like procurement lists whereby you can only buy from suppliers on the list unless you fancy filling out a few hundred pages of forms explaining why you want to buy from X instead. Usually set by the LEA so all schools in the area use the same list.
Then you've got the ol' chestnut - TCO. The school/LEA get convinced that having RM put all their crapware on the machines and dealing with hardware faults etc is cheaper than going with a skilled/responsive in-house team. Between needing fewer/cheaper IT staff, and having an off-the-shelf solution for things like print credits etc it looks like it may be cheaper.
Plus you've got tie-in. Once you're using RM crapware to deal with laptop security, network access restrictions etc it's gonna take time (and therefore money) to move away from RM to a more generic solution. Schools therefore continue buying more RM gear.
Personally I won't shed a tear for RM (although I would for their workers) - their business model was taking as much 'gov cash as possible. BSF was finished when we got the new government, pretty much on day one, so they should have realised they had to change tack. If they turn out *decent* gear they should do well - many (and I mean most) schools will no longer be under LEA control in 5 years time, so being on procurement lists etc won't cut it. Each school will look for the best value it can get for its own money. I wouldn't be surprised to see RM disappear tho.
Because RM had good contacts in local education authorities, and were adept at locking schools in to RM kit with subtly customised version of NT4 and tools for virtualizing access to CD-ROM drives etc.
You could end up with networks that couldn't apply standard MS patches to the servers FFS.
Throw in lethargic purchasing procresses, and the desire to get everything as one order rather than ordering a bunch of desktop PCs and a couple of servers, and they had a licence to print money, especially with BFS.
I really liked the 380Z, didn't mind the 480Z, hated the Nimbus 186, and don't get me started on the M series MCA machines, or the later stuff.
*COUGH*
Primary schools.
*COUGH*
Where your mocking, sarcastic remark is actually truth. How do I know? I spent 10 years as an independent IT guy formatting their crap and installing usable software on them, to the disgust of the local "bought" borough support (whom I cost many, many, many, many thousands of pounds of business by doing so, but whose support contracts strictly stipulate RM computers/software and HP printers ONLY) - all so the little kiddiewinks could get a fecking education and afford schoolbooks (which, in at least one school, was not an exaggeration given their annual support commitments for the existing RM gear they bought on Borough recommendation).
A school would hear about me, phone one of my "current" schools, I'd go round and survey their RM-unsupported, teachers-with-admin-privileges, worthless-security-software (RMGuard *COUGH*), manky IT nightmares and get them to something which could run Windows programs that they bought from a software supplier WITHOUT having to go through RM's "pre-approved / packaged" stuff (with is really just MSI's crippled to extremes so you can't use standard ones - couldn't even have a space in a package name without taking down the WHOLE network last I looked). Within weeks, they'd ditch their borough support, pay me half the equivalent and get ten times more use out of their computers. And, often, their next purchase would be one of those Borough-cringing "We're not touching RM, so tell us what else you can offer" arguments with some pencil-pusher.
Did it for 10 years before I got bored of the same stuff happening over and over again. Went to work for a private school who said, in the interview, "We don't touch that RM s***". Never was I more keen to accept a job offer.
Indeed, I went in to the missus' school a couple of times and couldn't believe the cheap tacky legacy shite (PIIIs in 2005/6) they'd been sold totally encumbered with poxy, inefficient crappy software. Supplier of overpriced underperformant educational computer hardware makes loss - who'd have thunk it?
I have worked in schools for the last 10 years and we are just coming to the end of an 8 year contract with RM. The amount they charged per computer per year was astronomical. We had 54 computers from them which we were forced to maintain over the 8 years at an astonishing cost. This contract has now ended (thank god) for the whole county in which I work. No wonder they are not making any money. Their gravy train came to the end of the line.
They have been ripping off schools for decades and I for one am glad it is ending.
We had mainly RM kit around my school in the 90s, although on one occasion I convinced one of the more maverick department heads to buy some machines from a better value local supplier, despite it not being the done thing with the local authority. Said department head also mentored a young Jonathan Ive some years before my time at the school, which might go some way towards the inspiration for 'thinking differently'.
I had a nice little business going until 1998. The schools had local support which would fix/replace individual machines quickly for a fair price (dirt cheap compared to RM). The head teachers were delighted to the point of recommending me to other schools/family/friends.
Then NuLab came along and told the schools that if they wanted ANY of the "new money" they would have to sign up to one of NuLab's "buddies" for ALL their IT requirements.
As one head put it "I can't go in front of the governors and say I'm turning down extra cash even though I know I'll get less IT equipment from the scheme than from you".
The last contact I had with any of these schools was when a school head paid for a repair to the secretary's machine himself. They'd been waiting 3 weeks and this was the only machine which could use the registration scanner/software. 2 hours after he called me it was fixed, at a cost of £30 or so (cheapo gfx card went pop IIRC).
So RM and all their NuLab buddies can go fuck themselves. I hope they go bust ASAP and I will happily piss on their grave.
Schools of course are now fucked because there is no local IT support infrastructure remaining who "understand" school requirements. Then again education is also fucked as NuLab dumbed it down to levels scarcely believable even from hardened cynics like myself.
the root of the problem was the government's decision to get into bed with Micro$oft and ditch Acorn. That basically put paid to any significant British presence in the PC and education market (because Acorn's main market was in education) apart from ARM which is of course an Acorn spin-off. RISC OS is of course alive and well but serves a very small niche and enthusiast market.
The root of the problem was NuLab's insistence that if you wanted any of the "new money" available to schools then you had to use one of their buddies ("approved supplier").
Frankly Acorn only have themselves to blame for what happened to them in the education market. Acorn ripped off schools left right and centre - they made RM look cheap, which is quite staggering from today's perspective.
Risc OS was great for its day but it made simple things like adding a CD-drive a total nightmare as you'd have to find the right firmware to recognise the drive, then actually write the firmware to PROMs, which wasn't guaranteed to work, if they could be written at all. I ended up having to buy new ROMs and fit them on mother in law's machine - do note that "fit" involved disassembly of said machine and desoldering the old ROMs and soldering in sockets/new ROMs. Don't get me started on what it took to get the Acorn to recognise the line out from the CD drive :)
Acorn machines were simply too "proprietory" to ever become mainstream. Simple as that.
If they ever had become mainstream then ARM wouldn't be the market leader in low power mobile processors. They'd be RM overcharging UK schools with no innovation whatsoever.
I don't know what machines you are on about here, but they don't fit the description of any RISC OS I've ever encountered, and that's a lot. No idea where you get the rip-off prices from, I was a dealer back then, and know what the margins were like.
Acorns' problem, amongst others, was their marketing was about as much use as a chocolate teapot.
And I wish the bloody hell RM could stop her bringing home a virus every time she has plugged her memory stick into a school computer. I know conficker was a bitch but near 3 years on they still haven't managed to remove it.
After hearing how much these bastards charge I'm sure someone like Halliburton could do the job cheaper and better by charging what they do for IT network infrastructure support in Iraq.
The reason the usb stick has a virus everytime she plugs it in is because RM removed the virus checkers from entire school networks on every computer for no reason whatsoever and then neglected to tell anyone.
If you don't believe me check her laptop, it either has no virus checker or a disabled, old version of Norton.
Which county does she work in? Does the term we-learn or PFI or CC3/4 mean anything to you?
I look after the IT at our local but small school (100 pupils) on a casual basis and was stunned by the £12k ADSL bill that they get - and that's after getting a discount for being a hub school.
If RM have based their income on x amount of schools paying that level or more and then they leave, thats a lot of lost revenue.
Greed.
They are a hub school as they have fiber inbound and I know the X21 links that go off to the other 2 local schools. I know they feed off a local college who has 100mb coming in and they are a hub too.
Im in a good position to know this as I was one of the engineers that RM / IHG employed to roll out the upgrade in 2010. AC for obvious reasons.
The real reason for having an RM network is that schools don't pay enough to have somebody that can really manage a network, or even if they will take the low pay, is obsequios to the teachers that pretend to know something about running a multi million pound business.
The RM stuff makes the easy tasks really easy, then again it can make difficult tasks impossible.
"he real reason for having an RM network is that schools don't pay enough to have somebody that can really manage a network"
Do you have any idea how much the average primary school is paying for "RM support"? With small secondary schools the figures are mind-boggling.
Here's a hint - a secondary school of 600 pays more for support than an interntaional defence company pays its own admins on a site of 800 people. Way more. Way way more.
With RM of old you always had to know what you were buying, and if you knew what you were buying you could get decent if unexciting middle-of-the-road kit at reasonable prices, and know that the company would back you up if it failed. We managed to buy some APC UPSs and Cisco kit way cheaper than other suppliers, for example, and we know RM's margin on those was less than 2%.
Their PCs were pretty solid, and could take quite a lot of punishment in the classroom, so were a good buy if you could nail the price down. But not any more. Nowadays they sell unreliable tat, and they don't have sufficient experienced support staff to be able to react if things go wrong. They're full of big promises on the quality of their hardware, software and services, but the reality is far short of the mark.
I used to think they were good if you did your homework on what you were buying (see what I did there?) Now I can't wait to have nothing more to do with them.
against my team at a previous job, to cover up for a system that had been dodgy for over a year, and push the managed service. Also shit hardware support and a workstation build system that requires model-specific write-enabled floppies (not PXE) in CC3, and (so I understood) feckloads of bugs early in CC4.
I used to work for them way back in 2000 down in Didcot. They were a great company to work for and treated staff extremely well - we had family days out and it was a relaxed casual atmosphere. ! Few contracts down the line I found out how much schools were paying for the PC's and I was utterly gobsmacked. Even with all the parental control / webmail and other "value added" stuff it was far, far too much. Still, it's something lots have companies have done with public sectorf companies over the years. I think everyone out there has two calculators...
Cost + Markup = Private sector price
Cost + Markup x 10 = Public sector price
As one of those LEA support bods who apparently had no idea, i spent most of the 6 years working in primary schools i got at most 1 full day a week to main tain upto 60+ machines 30 laptops and 2-3 servers and printers and often asked these same questions, why dont we do vanilla systems? why are we locked in? why not linux etc etc etc ,many many times. No one was interested.
Duff hardware more so the recent cc3/4 kit, and having to bypass all the god auwfull admin front ends to get anything working.
Co workers had no spark or intrest in IT.
The cuts came and allmost all schools slashed their budgets so when the reductions came i took the money and left.
It wasnt just RM it was LEA BSF and BECTA all had a good slurp of the gravy train and left those trying to help in the school with their hands tied and acting as proxies when things went bad between the management and the schools and getting no support from anyone, glad im out of it and from what i saw in the schools i weep for the future.
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