100 jobs saved as Dragons’ Den star’s company sold

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

Outsourcery was set up in 2007 by ex-Dragons’ Den star Piers Linney.

The entire business and assets of Outsourcery Hosting, which is headquartered in Manchester but has an office in Leicester been sold to GCI Network Solutions, which has bases in Derby and Lincoln.

This follows the appointment 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.”

Adrian Thirkill CEO at GCI 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.”

Last week, Lawrence Jones, the owner of UKFast, ruled out a deal to rescue Outsourcery, the company co-founded an owned by ex-Dragons’ Den investor Piers Linney.

This followed the suspension of trading in shares in Outsourcery with investors warned they were at risk of getting “no, or limited value” from their investment”.