*UKHotViewsExtra* The Panoply to float on AIM tomorrow

Tomorrow, The Panoply Holdings plc, “the parent company of a digitally native technology services group founded in 2016 with the aim of identifying and acquiring best-of-breed specialist information technology and innovation consulting businesses across Europe”, floats on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market. The offer is expected to raise £5m from the primary offering and £400K from secondary shares. The offering was oversubscribed.

Panoply definition: “An extensive or impressive collection”

The Group consists of four independently profitable businesses: Bene Agere (an Oslo-based strategy and management consultancy); Manifesto Digital (London-based digital experience agency, with a focus on service design, UX, and front-end web development, and a strength in not-for-profit); Notbinary (experts in transformation through software, data and automation—more on them later); and Questers (onshore and nearshore agile software development services, with clients including News UK and Ocado Retail).

Our understanding is that the four businesses, that have agreed to be a part of The Panoply, will be acquired today, i.e. the day before the float; however, all will continue to be run autonomously retaining their entrepreneurial spirit. In the year to end March 2017, the four companies had combined revenues of £10.6m; this increased to £15.6m in the 12 months to March 2018. The revenue split is 70% private sector; 18% not-for-profit and 12% Government.

According to the IPO documentation, The Panoply Group's primary strategy is “to acquire companies in order to build geographic regional clusters of complementary companies and help those acquired companies to achieve organic growth through a mixture of cross selling, upselling and winning bigger deals.” In other words, it is designed to offer the best of both large scale/corporate resilience of the large ICT firms and the niche platform specialism offered by SMEs. The Panoply Group’s core value set binds them together.

The Panoply was co-founded by Neal Gandhi (the Group’s Chief Executive) and Oliver James Rigby (CFO). Gandhi may be best known to UKHotViews readers as the co-founder of Attenda (since bought by Ensono – see Attenda acquired by Ensono); since leaving Attenda in 2005 he has been involved in a variety of ICT ventures, co-founding four technology services companies in total. Most worthy of note, he co-founded Quickstart Global, aimed at helping clients establish their own operations around the globe, from which Questers was spun-out in 2012.

Notbinary: A Panoply Group company

Last month, we met up with the CEO of one of the four companies within The Panoply Group: Notbinary. James Herbert, Notbinary’s CEO, previously co-founder of Methods Digital (having spun it out from Methods) and was its MD from 2012 to 2017. Prior, James was Director Transformation & Technology within the Cabinet Office (under UK Government CIO John Suffolk).

TechMarketView subscribers can read more about Notbinary, its history, its raison d’être, its successes to date, and its ambitions as part of The Panoply, in UKHotViewsExtra: The Panoply to float on AIM tomorrow. If you are not yet a subscriber, please contact Deb Seth to find out how to read this research note and more.

Posted by Georgina O'Toole at '19:01' - Tagged: cloud   software   ipo   data