Dragons' Den star's biz Outsourcery sends yet more millions up in smoke

Telly moneybags went into the cloud and still nobody's making any profit

Cloud service provider Outsourcery has released its half-year financials while talking up its business potential, quietly avoiding the fact that it has little to boast about in terms of actual performance.

Revenues at the cloud services player to the end of June moved up 23.5 per cent to £2.1m (including £1.5m of recurring revenue and £600,000 of non-recurring).

However, the Manchester-based firm, which floated on AIM in May raising circa £10m, trimmed its admin expenses to £5.1m which left an operating loss of £4.3m, down from a loss of £4.5m a year ago.

Loss for the period from continuing operations after finance costs and taxation were accounted for was £4.7m.

These sorts of numbers will hardly cause traditional IT suppliers to quiver in their boots at the much-talked-about threat from the new breed of channel services firms. Not yet, anyway.

Outsourcery delivers Microsoft applications as a service, including Unified Lync, mail, hosted video conferencing, CRM and ERP, Sharepoint and Office 365. It also sells managed and unmanaged servers, and cloudy transformation services.

"The fund raising at the IPO has provided us with further resources to build the business and consolidate our market position," said co-CEO Piers Linney - who stars on UK telly's Dragons' Den as a "digital entrepreneur" investor.

He pointed to recent "growth related developments" in the business since the close of the half-year, that will "materially increase revenue potential".

This month Outsourcery signed Ingram Micro to take its O-cloud platform - hardware, networking and software - hosted in a third party data centre to market. It said Ingram has doubled its reseller customer base to 370 firms.

In the public sector, the Cabinet Office has mandated a cloud-first policy but Microsoft's global platform are only IL2 accredited by UK.gov because it isn't hosted in the UK, so can't get the higher IL3 clearance required for larger public sector contracts dealing with more sensitive data..

Also this month, Outsourcery signed a deal with Microsoft, which will provide tech design and implementation support to a new platform that will be owned and managed by the cloudy Brit biz.

To date only a few firms, SCC and Skyscape have an IL3 accreditation platform in public sector and this took months of intensive work to achieve.

When ready, estimated at Q3 2013, this IL3 platform will be a physically separate version of the O-Cloud, punting IaaS, applications-as-a-service and Lync Server-based Unified Comms.

And only yesterday, Virgin Media confirmed it will be using Outsourcery's O-cloud to sell Microsoft Lync.

During the half year period, Outsourcery offloaded its UK mobile distie operation to UK mobile services operator, representing the last of its legacy non-cloud units. Revenues were accounted for separately and the sale had no material impact on working capital. ®