Salford Software back in profit as turnaround kicks in

THE boss of Salford Software – which specialises in identity management technology for the education and health sectors – says the business will make its first profit in three years at the end of this month.

Yorkshireman Paul Beaumont, 56, a former senior executive with Motorola, who was lured out of planned retirement last year to lead a turnaround at Salford Software. says the company will make around £200,000 on turnover of £6m in the year to the end of this month.

Mr Beaumont, who says his four-year target for Salford Software is to grow sales to £16m and profits to around £2.5m, is working with parent company the University of Salford, on a plan to give staff a stake in the business as an incentive to deliver the plan.

He told TheBusinessDesk.com: “I am very pleased with the progress we have made so far. Last year the business made a loss of just over £800,000 so to make £200,000 in profit- a swing of £1m – is great.

“I’ve also appointed a new FD, Marcus Patrick, who is very entrepreneurial, so with him, myself and chairman John Lillywhite there is a lot of experience and focus on where we’re going.

“We could have delivered an even better profit number, but I wanted to invest in developing new products.”

Mr Beaumont’s strategy is to offer education customers – universities and further and higher education colleges more products and services. Sales to the education sector accounts for 70% of revenues, with the remainder split evenly from healthcare and corporates.

“It makes a lot of sense to capitalise on our success in education – and by developing our own products rather than re-selling others’ – we are confident we can deliver.”
 
Some of the new suite of products are being developed in house and some in India, at a sotware house in Chennai.

One of the new products is called ARMS and is an (Affiliate Record Management System) and provides university IT departments with a better and more efficient way of managing users on the network.

Mr Beaumont said: “By using ARMS one institution found there were 14,000 on their network who shouldn’t have been there – these users would be visiting students, contractor or academics, who were never cleaned from the system after leaving.

“ARMS has helped the university to save a significant amount of money. We’ve also lauched a product called Cobra, for students, which brings all their data, record and social network activities into one platform.”

Staff numbers are current at 47 but will reach 55 in the next year as new sales and development staff join the business.