SCC buys 'controlling stake' in mobile services biz One Point

Third investment this year, CEO Rigby stuffed, no room left even for a wafer thin mint

SCC has injected a mobile element to its managed services portfolio by grabbing a “controlling stake” in voice and data minnow One Point Communications, The Channel can reveal.

This is the third such investment in new skills this year following similarly structured deals with voice and UC specialist SIPCOM and data connectivity outfit Fulidata, whose services are hosted by SCC’s three data centres.

Surrey-based One Point, founded in 2000, runs an enterprise support desk, sells Mobile Data Management, Mobile Data Optimisation, tablet “solutions”, Machine 2 Machine SIMs, and fixed line services - among other things.

SCC CEO James Rigby told us a couple of months back that it wanted to slot mobile services into its data centre services product set, which are forecast too turn over £40m in fiscal ’16 that ends in March, up from £26m last fiscal.

“We’ve been actively pursuing an investment in mobile,” said Rigby in a statement. “This investment marks the completion of our Cloud Delivered Management Services portfolio, in terms of capability.”

The last major investment on the horizon is to add extra bit barn capacity, assuming things go as planned. SCC runs a trio of server farms (two in Birmingham and one in Fareham) that provide more than 1,800 racks and 14Mv of power. Currently those bit barns are 67 per cent occupied.

One Point filed abbreviated accounts for calendar ’14 showing net assets of £2.16m, up from £1.62m in the prior year.

In the chairman’s report, the company noted only 20 per cent of its revenue in the year was commission based, and it expects to lower this proportion over the “next two years”.

This plays to SCC’s ambitions to build annuity-based revenues - managed services accounted for £114m worth of company sales in the last fiscal year, which makes the company bigger than most of the local MSPs out there. ®