Scottish-headquartered cloud computing provider iomart has broken through the £100m revenue barrier with a 6% increase in turnover, although organic growth in its cloud services business was lower than expected for much of the year. Iomart in 2015 acquired SystemsUp, which has worked with Farrer & Co in moving its infrastructure to Microsoft Azure.
The AIM-listed company’s revenue for the year ended 31 March 2019 was £103,709, up from £97.8m in the previous year. CEO and founder Angus MacSween said: “During the year we broke through the £100m revenue barrier, a landmark for the business and validation of the strategy we established over ten years ago.”
iomart’s cloud services business, which SystemsUp is part of, grew by 8% to £90.6m. However, the increase was the result of both organic growth and acquisitions and without the acquisition of Bytemark and LDeX the growth was 2%. The accounts say: “The lower organic growth rate reflects the cumulative impact of lower new customer orders in FY 18 and FY 19 which has been addressed by the reorganisation of our sales and marketing engine.” It adds: “March, the final month of our financial year, was the highest revenue month of the year, and reflects the reinvigoration of the sales and marketing function in the last year. We enter the new financial year with a more positive revenue run rate.”
The cloud business provides managed cloud computing facilities and services through a network of owned datacentres to the larger SME and corporate markets. The segment uses several routes to market including iomart Cloud, Infrastructure as a Service (JaaS), SystemsUp, Cristie Data, Dediserve, Simple Servers, Sonassi plus LDeX and Bytemark.
The accounts include a ‘Brexit clause’ which states: “The majority of our revenue is generated within the UK. Revenue generated from other EU states is not material, the bulk of which is from our on line operations involving the provision of domain names and both shared and dedicated servers where our customers are choosing to take a service from our UK-based datacentres.”
In 2017 we revealed that Farrer & Co had selected SystemsUp to help it move to a secure Microsoft Azure hybrid cloud platform and a desktop environment based on Office 365 and Windows 10. IT director Neil Davison and SystemsUp managing director Nick Martin talked to us about the process that they have engaged in so far and the two-year road map ahead. You can read that initial interview here: https://legaltechnology.com//latest-news/exclusive-farrer-co-to-move-to-azure-heres-the-roadmap/
We recently caught up with Martin, Davison and Farrers’ head of IT systems Andy Beech, to find out how the project is panning out. Has each of the stages gone as expected? What have been the unexpected challenges? We expected there would be a few bumps in the road and, of course, there have been. But have they been overcome, and if so how? You can download that article for free in the latest July/August newsletter here: https://legaltechnology.com//latest-newsletter/