This article is more than 1 year old

Outsourcery shutters CRM practice... almost

Keeps one man to man phones for existing punters, majority leave for QuantiQ

Cash strapped cloud biz Outsourcery has effectively shuttered its CRM practice to new customers after the majority of its team departed for new pastures.

We aren’t talking big numbers here: four staffers have defected to Microsoft CRM and ERP consultant QuantiQ and two people have left to join other companies.

That leaves one techie manning the phones for Outsoucery’s existing CRM customers - a firm run by ex-Dragon’s Den man Piers Linney and his co-CEO Simon Newton, who both gave up their salary last year to save £500k in costs.

Former Insight EMEA president Stuart Fenton, who acquired QuantiQ - previously branded Tectura - in June last year, confirmed the appointments.

“Despite having a terrific team in a market segment growing at five times the rest of the IT market, it seems Outsourcery couldn’t make the CRM business viable over the long term.”

Fenton said he was given permission by Outsourcery management to approach some members of the team.

Like the rest of its portfolio, Microsoft favours the cloudy flavour of CRM. Outsourcery provided the on-premise version that it then hosted for customers.

We called Linney to ask him questions about the reasons for the move. “What about our CRM team” he said, before refusing to comment when we explained the nature of our questions.

According to Gartner, CRM software grew 13.3 per cent globally in 2014 to $23.2bn, with Salesforce leading the pack, followed by SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. SaaS accounted for almost 47 per cent of the total market.

“Our CRM Online business is very healthy, we are outpacing the market growth,” Fenton claimed, albeit from a smaller base. ®

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