100 jobs saved at Outsourcery

SOME 100 jobs have been saved at struggling Manchester cloud services company Outsourcery following a deal for it to be sold.

The company founded by Dragons’ Den investor Piers Linney has seen its entire assets sold to London-headquartered GCI Network Solutions Ltd.

This follows the appoitment of Sam Woodward and Simon Edel of EY’s restructuring team as joint administrators.

Woodward said: “Over a number of years Outsourcery had invested significantly in its IT infrastructure and cost base in anticipation of strong revenue growth from its O-Cloud platform.



”In practice, the pace of revenue growth was below expectations resulting in Outsourcery suffering trading losses and cash flow pressure.



”The board was unable to secure additional working capital funding and as such, commenced a marketing process to identify potential buyers for the business.”



“I am pleased to report that following that marketing process, we were able to secure a sale of the majority of the Outsourcery business to GCI Network Solutions immediately following administration, which presents an excellent outcome for the business, preserves approximately 100 jobs and provides continuity of service for its customers.”

GCI chief executive Adrian Thirkill: said: “We are delighted to make this further investment in our Cloud and Unified Communication (UC) solutions portfolio.

“Outsourcery has some great underlying characteristics: it has some very talented people, a strong Skype for Business capability, an impressive customer base, some well-engineered platforms and lots of potential.

“We see this as a really nice fit for GCI and are pleased that we managed to secure the deal.

 “To be clear, this acquisition is not a capability purchase. We already have considerable expertise in the cloud and UC space including tens of thousands of Skype for Business seats deployed across the UK and Europe via our direct and indirect sales channels.

“What it does do is build upon an already strong foundation and raise our profile in the market – a market reported to be growing at five times the rate of traditional voice services.

“Most importantly, this acquisition also provides assured continuity of service for all of Outsourcery’s customers, resellers and partners.”

“On the subject of partners, this deal is also about reaffirming our commitment to some of our own key partnerships – Vodafone, Microsoft and Virgin Media Business.

“GCI is already a Vodafone Platinum Partner (through our forward-looking London-based Commsxchange operation) and this acquisition provides the opportunity to broaden and develop that collaboration.”

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