Tech key to €250m Linde and BOC merger savings

Industrial gases group Linde is moving to a standardised global IT platform as part of company-wide plans to save €250m following the acquisition of BOC last year.

German-based Linde completed the £8.2bn acquisition of the UK's BOC in September 2006 creating a company with more than 50,000 employees and operations worldwide.

In an exclusive CIO Vision video interview with silicon.com, Peter Dew, CIO at Linde Group, said the merger was predicated on the ability of the new company to deliver €250m of savings by the end of 2008, and that IT will play a part in meeting that target.

Linde will adopt a more global IT strategy, in line with the model that Dew spent eight years implementing in his previous role as CIO of BOC and one of the key planks of this global model will be a common SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform.

Other video interviews in the CIO Vision Series include

♦ British Airways
♦ Reuters
♦ Virgin
♦ Vodafone

Dew said: "We had a common understanding between both legacy organisations that a bedrock of SAP-enabled business processes was important, and great people, knowledge, skills and capability across the world in understanding its implementation."

Another area for more efficiency savings will be more standardisation, with common deployments of laptop, desktop technologies, and server consolidation - "the standard things you would expect from a merger of this scale and complexity", Dew added.

The scale of the new group will also lead to better deals with key technology suppliers.

He said: "We now just about spend twice as much with every key vendor today than either of us did as our constituent parts. So, thankfully, our partners and vendors have come to the table and are working with us to make sure that we achieve some pretty significant benefits there."