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Outsourcery Shares Suspended as Asset Buyer Sought

Troubled cloud applications reseller Outsourcery had its shares suspended on AIM last week as the company announced it was unable to complete its financial reporting for year ending December 2015.

Recently the firm, jointly headed by CEO's Piers Linney (pictured) and Simon Newton, had revealed that despite a loan of £8m from Vodafone in April to keep the wolves at bay, the company was looking to find a buyer for their assets.

Financial analysts are commenting this move will result in little or no value being received by shareholders which include Lawrence Jones, founder and chief executive of Manchester-headquartered hosting provider UKFast, who invested £1m in September 2015.

Outsourcery only this week announced a new contact centre application to work with Skype for Business following a partnership with vendor Enghouse. Lack of its own IP however made differentiating the current Skype for Business offering difficult.

From its inception and launch in 2007 Outsourcery chose to bring Microsoft UC products to market via the channel, a move this magazine reported as being unlikely to succeed due to Microsoft Lync and its predecessors being more suited at that time to Enterprise class users than to the SME firms typically targeted by UK channel resellers.

Eventually, in 2014, Outsourcery acknowledged the strategy wasn't working and switched emphasis to direct sales. Sales improved and losses began to slow down. Last autumn the company prematurely announced the impending arrival of sales guru Emma de Sousa from reseller Insight Enterprises UK as their new Managing Director but she failed to turn up on the scheduled date of April 1.

Today the Outsourcery faces stiff competition from Azure with all the engineering and scale that has behind it with the result seeming likely to be that current investors will be taking an early bath.