Founded in 1983, Centerprise International was created at a time when the PC industry was just emerging here in the UK. It started out making custom-built PCs and in 1985 began supplying retailers with complete units for the consumer market.

The big break for the company came in 1989, when it won a contract to supply the Ministry of Defence with desktop systems. Three years later, it won another contract to supply the Ministry with laptops as well.

"The MoD contracts were instrumental in building CI," says Centerprise's chairman, Rafi Razzak. "In the early 1990s, we didn't have a marketing strategy. We were just a team of engineers who had the good fortune to land a very large contract.

"CI is built on the experience we gained from working with the MoD. It's a very demanding contractor – when it says 'jump' it expects people to say 'how high?' Working with the MoD built up the company's discipline and we realised that customer service and attention to their needs were the keys to running a successful business. Within two years, we went from making £2 million per annum to making £18 million every year."

After forging a viable business model from its experience with the Ministry of Defence, Centerprise returned to the retail market stronger than ever before and with an eye on project management services and end-to-end solutions.

"We had a number of key retail contracts during the 1990s," continues Razzak. "For example, Dixons was looking a for a vendor that could build PCs and we helped build up the Advent brand for it. We were the first to use Pentium in the UK; we brought in the first one gigahertz AMD processor, and the first graphics card.

"In fact, at one point almost every major IT retailer – such as John Lewis, Kingfisher, PC World and Dixons – was stocking Centerprise PCs under different brand names."

Despite economic pressures, Centerprise has been able to maintain its manufacturing capacity here in the UK.

"Despite what people say, labour costs are not a real issue for us," asserts Razzak. "UK-based manufacturing and configuration is important because most smaller or specialist orders are still best filled from within this country.

"Maintenance issues are covered better from this country too. If you simply supply PCs with no additional services, you won't do well. End-to-end solution provision requires a local manufacturing base."

Centerprise's 26 years of experience has positioned it to make some key observations on the development of the British IT market and Razzak believes that the future lies in value added services.

"The key issue today is overseas competition," he observes. "In many ways our market resembles the car industry in that we're seeing a drop in average selling prices and a reduction on margins.

"There's no future in simply making PCs and selling them – this needs to be part of a larger operation. We consider end-to-end solutions to be the most viable business model today."

End-to-end solutions are also likely to be Centerprise's business model of the future too, as the company still enjoys a number of solutions provision contracts.

"The future is hopefully very bright," concludes Razzak. "The public sector is still extremely important to us and we now hold contracts that cover the military, health, education and local government. We're also moving very much in to services – we now offer disaster recovery and information assurance, such as data encryption.

"Business IT will soon be a utility service, and the end-to-end solutions will be the services themselves. Hardware and equipment will be hired and provided depending on the function it needs to perform.

"I firmly believe that the future of business IT will be all about the service level agreement, which gives the management of a company the power to state what they need, and get it."