Search through our UKHotViews and UKHotViewExtra articles plus complete research reports
Seeing Machines, the Australia-based, but AIM listed provider of visual computing systems that track faces, eyes and facial features in real-time, has announced the successful pre-placement of a £15m capital raising. The new shares have been placed with institutions and will thus stiffen the shareholder base as the company continues its growth plans.
Full year results (to end June) showed revenue up 63% to A$12.7m (c.£7m) with gross profit up 74% and a move into the black at the net profit line, to A$0.6m (c.£310k). Particular growth is being seen in the use of the company’s specialist technology in driver safety systems, to detect the signs of fatigue, with several big orders in the mining industry. The company envisages a wider use for this system in the next generation of cars and trucks. In addition, the company is developing a range of advanced eye-testing machines. As a result they forecast strong growth in the current financial year.
Looking ahead to a Big Data world, as companies seek to understand how customers interact with devices, or other people, or even with how supermarket shelves are laid out, the specialist capabilities of Seeing Machines may well find many innovative uses – and the company now has a stronger capital base from which to develop.
Posted by Peter Roe at '09:29' - Tagged: bigdata
Fujitsu today announced its intention to de-list its shares from the London Stock Exchange – essentially a recognition of the sea-change in financial markets over the past thirty years and an obvious way to cut costs.
Fujitsu was listed on the LSE in 1981. Around that time there was a spate of listings by Japanese companies on the LSE and NYSE, as they were rapidly internationalising their operations. Japanese investment banks (I worked for one of them in the late 80s) were keen to list the large industrial companies on international exchanges so that they could access more capital, give them a local stockmarket presence (in markets that were still very geographically siloed) and also to help the banks themselves in those geographies.
People can now invest in the Japanese market very easily and Fujitsu can access the world's capital markets from Shimbashi. There is no need from a financing point of view to have a listing on the LSE and it is unlikely to make any difference at all to customers nowadays. The world has moved on.
Posted by Peter Roe at '09:09'
We recently attended the European analyst event of offshore centric BPS provider Genpact, where we heard from two major UK customers and top management about its plans for growth. Genpact is of real interest to us because it is something of an anomaly in the UK.
As the former captive BPO operation of one of the world’s largest companies, General Electric, Genpact has grown to become a major $2bn IT/BP player in finance and accounting (F&A) BPO for large enterprises, and now also IT for financial services providers, competing often against much larger players like IBM, Accenture, Capgemini and HP. But for a company of its size and reach, Genpact has limited exposure to the UK market. This is made all the more noticeable by smaller offshore centric peers like WNS, EXL Service and Firstsource being much bigger in the UK than Genpact.
In this BusinessProcessViews company note, we explore why this is the case, and assess what challenges and opportunities Genpact faces as it seeks to expand market share in the UK (see here).
Posted by John O'Brien at '12:21' - Tagged: offshore bps
To run a company successfully, management needs the right information at the right time. Most UK SMEs still rely on Excel or stand-alone systems to provide this information but an estimated 25,000 of them would benefit from the use of Business Intelligence (BI) systems. Dynamic Business Intelligence aims to make these systems available and affordable to SMEs, by building a cloud-based, as a Service BI proposition. This represents a huge opportunity for this little British Battler which expects to generate around £1.2m of revenue (and positive EBITDA) this year.
Dynamic BI, founded in early 2012, has taken a fresh look at the science of Business Intelligence to build its Firefly platform. This automates the usually bespoke process of building the necessary queries, deciding how to store the underlying data and generating reports, without having to use complex BI tools or expensive specialist personnel. The company has funded its proposition development through its conventional BI activity.
Building on its experience with enterprise deployment, Dynamic BI is working to build a differentiated cloud-based proposition and will launch the initial service in January 2014. By targeting SMEs, initially via a free, trial subscription, the management expects to be able to build scale rapidly, ensuring a substantial and profitable annuity revenue base.
Posted by Peter Roe at '22:05' - Tagged: lbb
Today we are again delighted to welcome Datum as a TechMarketView banner advertiser. This Hampshire based company is a pure play, colocation, and datacentre services provider delivering a 'colocation platform for the digital economy'. 100% client focused, Datum claims to deliver Environmentally Intelligent colocation underpinned by a highly available and highly secure, carrier-neutral environment. They have a state of the art datacentre on the secure Cody Technology Park in Farnborough catering for bespoke requirements with 24/7 technical support and specialist engineering services.
Follow the banner link to find out more about what Datum has to offer.
If you would like to find out more about the UKHotViews banner advertising service – and how you can put your company's name in front of over 12,000 of the most senior people in UK technology - please contact Helen McTeer on our client services team.
Posted by HotViews Editor at '06:00'
After a funding round to raise £2.5m in the summer, see here, MoPowered, the mobile commerce website development platform, has announced that it will list on AIM, at the same time raising a further £4m to fund an increase in sales and marketing, continue development and pay back some debt.
MoPowered, founded in 2006, focuses on SMEs that have already built an on-line sales channel, using the MoPowered platform to quickly provide them with a high quality mobile-commerce site so that they can benefit from the growth in this channel. This new site will offer the same content as their online presence, but optimised for viewing on a small screen, navigable using a touchscreen and providing access to the retailer’s payment gateways. MoPowered receives a set-up fee and then a percentage of the transaction value. This is a cloud-based service which the MoPowered management believes will scale. With over 100 customers signed up, the key strategy is to build market presence, the customer base and annuity revenue, hence the investment in sales teams and the link with payment service providers to act as agents for the MoPowered offering. When we met the management, they indicated that expansion into Continental Europe is targeted for 2014.
As we have discussed in our report on mobile commerce, “Setting the scene for Mobile banking”, accessible by FinancialServicesViews subscribers here, the growth in mobile commerce far exceeds that of on-line retail. MoPowered offers a new angle on this market development. Well worth watching.
Posted by Peter Roe at '18:24' - Tagged: mobility payments
You have to tip your hat to Tim Fouracre, co-founder and CEO of UK accounting software SaaS start-up Clear Books. He set out to raise over £800k through DIY ‘crowdfunding’ (see here) and by gosh he did it! In fact, when the fundraising closed on 31st October, it was oversubscribed; not bad considering they were asking investors to pay £8.94 per share – an implied valuation of £19m – for a company with revenues of £473k and net losses of £65k.
I met up with Fouracre last week. TechMarketView subscription service clients can read the rest of the story on UKHotViews Extra.
Posted by Anthony Miller at '17:57' - Tagged: lbb crowdfunding
Earthport, the AIM-listed cross-border payments service provider, today announced full year results to June 2013, showing revenue up 37% to £4.1m and losses falling by 23% to £6.5m. After a placing last year and a $10m investment by IFC (part of the World Bank Group), the company had year-end cash of £13m. Around £6m will be used to buy Baydonhill, a foreign exchange broker, so Earthport can provide a comprehensive white label service, with investment planned in increasing geographical reach, particularly in Asia, and building the sales effort.
Earthport’s history illustrates the current rate of change within the payments industry. In 2010 the company began to focus on the underserved and oligopolistic cross-border payments network. This market had been dominated by SWIFT and correspondent banking relationships for larger payments and by companies like Western Union for remittances from migrant workers. However, this sector of the payments market is changing fast; there is exponential growth in volume, particularly of low value payments, with many more participants due to the Internet and globalisation of trade, employment and investment, and a demand for faster settlement and lower charges.
Having already signed up Western Union, Earthport is now adding large customers, such as Bank of America, American Express and large e-commerce players, who will use the company’s platform to deliver low-value payments cost-effectively across Earthport’s network into 60 countries. With ever-increasing demands on their resources, banks are more prepared to use scale-advantaged utility platforms such as Earthport. Hank Uberoi, ex-Goldman Sachs and Hedge Fund manager, now Earthport CEO, sees the company as becoming the key provider of low-value cross-border payment delivery across the whole industry and benefiting from exponential growth. If he is right, and so far so good, Earthport will be one of the most interesting companies to watch in this dynamic market.
Please note: Our report on the payments market, “Setting the Scene for Mobile Banking” can be accessed here. To learn more about our new service on the Financial Services, see here.
Posted by Peter Roe at '09:12' - Tagged: payments
At the beginning of the month Steria confirmed that it had won a ten-year contract with the UK Cabinet Office to set up a joint venture called Shared Services Connected Ltd (SSCL). SSCL will provide back-office services including procurement, finance and HR to Government departments. Steria will consolidate existing service centres at DWP, Defra, the Environment Agency and UK SBS, which provides shared services to Research Councils UK and other non-government department bodies. SSCL will also explore the possibility of supporting private sector organisations.
Steria beat TCS and Serco at the final hurdle to win the contract (see Steria wins £1b Government shared services deal for our initial coverage). When we caught up with Steria UK CEO, John Torrie, he described it as “a pivotal deal”, referring to the way that the Joint Venture (JV) is set to fundamentally change the way that Government transacts business. In this latest PublicSectorViews note - Steria & SSCL: a pivotal deal - we explore the deal and what it means to Steria. Subscribers can download the research now, anyone else should contact Deb Seth for more information.
Posted by Georgina O'Toole at '21:12' - Tagged: publicsector contract bpo sharedservices bps
As mobile systems drive more and more retail transactions, we are pleased to welcome Paythru to the LBB programme. Paythru brings a new approach to mobile commerce. Many companies focus purely on the final payment as money changes hands, but Paythru engages much earlier in the transaction, providing targeted marketing messages delivered in the context of the consumer’s location, previous activity and personal preferences. The payments component of the solution then enables the retailer to track offer redemption accurately and thereby to monitor the success of offers and micro-segmentation strategies, driving significantly higher rates of completed transactions.
Through its “Ignite” mobile commerce enablement platform, Paythru targets larger retailers and owners of sites with multiple stores, such as shopping malls and sports venues. It also offers mobile commerce systems to restaurants (Jamie Oliver) and Pubs (via the Orderella app) and has recently won The Payments Awards prize for “Best in-store payments solution” for its system in the Mudo chain in Turkey.
Paythru has set itself some aggressive revenue targets and looks to reach break-even in 2014. The company is already talking to some big UK High St. names and we expect to hear a lot about this exciting company over the next few months.
Posted by Peter Roe at '16:03' - Tagged: payments
Dutch ERP provider UNIT4 is setting up to be acquired by private equity firm Advent International for €1.17bn. The cash offer is conditional but as it follows a structured sales process, has the backing of the board and represents a 32% premium on the share price prior to UNIT4 announcing interest from potential acquirers (see here), there is not much to impede it. An alternative offer is only an outside possibility because at c18 times adjusted EBITDA, the Advent offer is a generous multiple, especially for a traditional software company transitioning from license to SaaS/subscription revenue, which is what this prospective deal is really about. The announcement went down well with shareholders, with the share price rising 8% on the news. TechMarketView subscribers can read our analysis of the proposed deal in HotViewsExtra here.
Posted by Angela Eager at '18:26' - Tagged: acquisition saas cloud software
A brief management statement from Gresham Computing, a provider of specialist software-based solutions to support trading and the back office, has confirmed the progress that we anticipated in our August 14th UKHotView following their half year results. These showed revenues up 23% and increasing momentum for their order book.
Since these results, we have had the opportunity to meet the management, who in our view took a considered approach to the problems of the back office. Three years ago it set about understanding how innovations in technology could be used in addressing the problems of a specific back/middle office function, that of reconciliations. Many institutions are using in-house systems for this activity which is becoming increasingly important as trading becomes more complex and as the requirement for risk management and tight financial control increases. The resultant Clareti Transaction Control (CTC) platform incorporates an in-memory matching engine supported by intelligent data mapping and learning capabilities. The Gresham management suggests that the shorter set-up times, higher speed and lower costs of the CTC places them in a good position.
Gresham have since succeeded in winning orders from insurance companies, investment managers and investment banks. In addition, they have started a project with a global investment bank where their CTC is made available to the clients of the bank, thereby broadening Gresham’s access to potential customers.
We share the management’s confidence of continued growth. They now have reference customers and good visibility as to medium term advances in annuity and SaaS revenue. 2013 is turning out to be a pivotal year for Gresham, as forecast by the management in their 2012 annual report, since when the share price has risen by nearly 60%.
To find out more about TechMarketView's new service focusing on Software and IT Services in the Financial Services sector, follow this link.
Posted by Peter Roe at '08:55' - Tagged: trading backoffice
judo, a small company spun out of Paymentsense, the UK Merchant Service Provider to concentrate on mobile commerce technology, has just won a major contract with Countrywide, the UK’s largest estate agency and lettings network. As a result, Countrywide customers will be able to pay for services immediately over a mobile without sharing their card details with the letting agent. This, they hope, will significantly improve the 'customer experience' and reduce concerns over security and the potential for Card-Not-Present fraud.
This is the first major contract for judo, a 15-person company which is addressing the large market for mobile payment systems among small and medium sized merchants. Its platform went live in July and so far has signed up about 2,000 merchants.
judo appears to offer a different approach to many other payments platform providers, having started its development from a mobile perspective. As such its system recognises the limitations of mobile networks and reduces the number of necessary interactions between the mobile device and the central server. More work is done in the app itself to provide PCI/DSS standard security to reduce the number of failed or abandoned transactions. This seems like an elegant solution and could provide judo with competitive differentiation as it sets out to build market position.
Subscribers to our recently launched FinancialServicesViews research stream can access our recent overview of the Mobile-commerce market here. If you would like more details of our new sector-focused service, see here, or contact Deb Seth in Client Services.
Posted by Peter Roe at '08:46' - Tagged: mobility payments
Further to our note on SCC’s FY13 (see SCC reveals "stable" FY13 numbers), we have spent some time with James Rigby, MD of the UK business. For context, the SCC brand was part of the SCH Group, which until last year also included the SDG distribution business – sold to Tech Data (‘Mysterious House of Rigby’ severs distribution arm). SCC is now a £665m technology product and services business – which operates primarily in the UK. With SDG at its new home, the objective now is to build the SCC brand in the market and achieve substantial growth, aided by the funds from the SDG sale.
Of SCC’s £665m revenues, services account for c17%. The services business is worth about £115m in the UK and grew 7% in FY13. About 30% of this business is derived from professional services (e.g. Windows 7 deployments), and the remainder from managed services (i.e. IT support and IT outsourcing). At £115m, SCC as an infrastructure services provider is significantly smaller than Computacenter (£431m), but larger than Logicalis (c£70m).
We examine SCC’s growth plans, its recent contractual successes and its cloud offering in this HotViewsExtra piece – available to subscribers only.
Posted by Kate Hanaghan at '09:00' - Tagged: infrastructure growth
Today, TechMarketView is pleased to announce the launch of FinancialServicesViews, its research stream dedicated to the coverage of the Software and IT Services (SITS) market in the UK Banking, Financial Markets and Insurance businesses. The research stream is led by Research Director, Peter Roe and builds on the established capability of the wider TechMarketView team, viewing their analysis through the lens of the Financial Services sector.
As a group, Financial Services organisations are the largest SITS buyer within the UK private sector, accounting for around a quarter of the market, or £9.8bn of annual revenue. The sector is also the most dynamic as many sector companies seek to use technology to generate competitive advantage and faster profits growth. After a period of turmoil following the Financial Crash of 2008, TechMarketView forecasts a growth rate of 3.8% per year to 2016, significantly ahead of the total SITS market and of the wider private sector SITS market.
Today TechMarketView publishes one of the core reports from FinancialServicesViews: UK Financial Services SITS: Market Trends and Forecasts. The report presents a heat map of SITS activity, identifying key areas for investment and focus. Currently, the key areas for sector spending are currently dealing with regulatory change, updating legacy systems and looking for cost reduction and flexibility through the greater use of Cloud Services. The report also describes the key issues and outlook for each of the Banking, Financial Markets and Insurance subsectors and across the major sub-divisions of the SITS market.
The outlook for the sector is exciting as the larger companies reduce their dependence on in-house IT in the face of intense competition and greater regulation. This could add a further £1bn to the addressable market for SITS vendors over the next 5-10 years. To find out how to benefit from the growth in the market, subscribers can download the latest report here.
In addition to the Market Trends report, subscribers to FinancialServicesViews will receive reports on the Supplier Landscape (due later this year) as well as a series of notes focussed on key sector topics. To subscribe, or to find out more, please look at our FinancialServicesViews web page, or contact Deb Seth of TechMarketView Client Services.
Posted by Peter Roe at '09:22'
It’s a dynamic period in the cloud SMB accounting and ERP software market. Over recent weeks Xero has gained additional funding to back its competitive push against the likes of on-premise giants Sage and Intuit. IRIS Software Group acquired fast growing UK SaaS book keeping application provider Kashflow. Meanwhile SAP revealed it was moving part of the development resource away from its SMB SaaS suite Business ByDesign, of which accounting is a core component. Then Sage unwrapped Sage One Accounts Extra, which is its latest push into the cloud. Now a batch of former Sage senior exec’s have turned up at cloud pure-play VersAccounts, a very new player in the field.
TechMarketView subscribers can read our take on the latest moves in the market and what actions suppliers need to take to be competitive in this fast-moving sector in HotViewsExtra, here.
Posted by Angela Eager at '17:55' - Tagged: saas cloud software
At the start of 2013 we predicted a make or break year for SaaS ERP. For SAP it looked like it was the year its mid-market SaaS business applications suite Business ByDesign (BBD), broke when it announced in October that it was moving some of the development resources away from BBD and would be using its partner ecosystem to support “current functionality and scope” of the product. But it seems rather than casting the product away, SAP is throwing even more (but shared) resources at this poorly performing product to bring it closer into the fold in the hopes it can make something of it. We can see BBD changing form quite radically. In the meantime, ERP mid-market specialists like UNIT4, and Advanced Computer Software have an opportunity to shine. Subscribers to the ESASViews research stream can read our analysis in SAP Business ByDesign: direction and market impact. As always, Deborah Seth is on hand if you’d like information on how to subscribe to our services.
Posted by Angela Eager at '12:05' - Tagged: saas cloud software
We were interested to see today’s announcement from BT , which has signed agreements with three ‘best of breed’ suppliers – Harris, InterSystems and Healthcare Gateway (the JV between EMIS and InPS) – to offer “interoperability solutions which provide a joined up view of a patient’s care”. The offering allows health and social care organisations, subject to information governance restrictions, to share information held about a patient across various IT systems in a single place using their existing infrastructure. It will also mean patients can access their own records to see test results, schedule appointments or communicate directly with their clinicians.
The move is timely and a good fit with Government and NHS policy, as well as market trends. Eligible TechMarketView subscription clients can read the detail in UKHotViewsExtra today - see here.
Posted by Tola Sargeant at '21:56' - Tagged: partnerships socialcare health
As the dust settled after Dell’s high profile move back into private hands (see Dell ding dong done and dusted), we caught up with Dell’s UK public sector team and were surprised to find a business that is outperforming the market in many areas.
Dell is bigger than you might think in the UK public sector, in part because around 60% of the business comes indirectly via VARs, SIs, ISVs and OEMs who include Dell products as part of their solutions to public sector customers. We estimate that the UK Public Sector business unit - which includes private healthcare, life sciences and pharma as well as traditional areas of the UK public sector - accounts for some £370m ($600m) of Dell’s UK turnover and employs about 150 people. Around a third of the revenue comes from software and IT services (SITS) rather than hardware, suggesting that Dell sits just outside the Top 20 SITS suppliers to the UK public sector, but just within the Top 20 IT services rankings, with revenues from the sector of c£120m.
You might also be surprised to learn that, unlike many of its peers, Dell reports good levels of growth from its UK public sector business. It grew in high single-digits this year and the management team expects growth to remain at 6-10% over the next few years. That’s pretty impressive given that our forecasts suggest a CAGR for the UK public sector SITS market of just 1% between 2012 and 2016.
So how is that Dell - a company that we’ve frankly not been kind to in recent years and has not been performing well at a global level - is outperforming the UK public sector SITS market?
Eligible TechMarketView subscription clients can read our view - and learn more about Dell’s plans in the sector - in the latest research from our PublicSectorViews research stream: Dell surprises in UK public sector.
If you’re not yet a fully paid up subscriber to our research services, Deborah Seth will be very pleased to provide you with further details.
Posted by Tola Sargeant at '19:30' - Tagged: publicsector
Todays’ the day that CEOs from 12 ‘Little British Battler’ software and IT services companies gather in London to meet the TechMarketView research team to share and get feedback on their business plans and aspirations. The ‘LBB 12’ (see here for the list) were selected from some 100 companies who applied to participate in this the third LBB Day since we launched the programme in 2011.
We will be publishing short opinion pieces on each of the 12 companies in UKHotViews over the next couple of weeks, and a more detailed analysis in a research report due for release in December which will only be available to eligible TechMarketView subscription service clients.
By the way, because every TechMarketView analyst is involved with this event, today’s UKHotViews will be a little sparser than usual. But don’t worry, normal service will be resumed tomorrow and we’ll make sure nothing important gets missed.
Posted by HotViews Editor at '06:00' - Tagged: events lbb
