Member Info for Aphrodite

Grand Union’s £1m Castleton infrastructure deal

Castleton Technology has embarked on a four-year managed service project at Grand Union Housing Group. The project is valued at around £1 million, with the initial cloud and uni ed communications implementation expected to be completed by August 2019.
Simon Penaluna,?IT Director, Grand Union Housing
Castleton’s multi-cloud approach for the housing provider includes an ‘edge’ systems refresh, private-cloud hosting in Castleton’s ‘tier four’ accredited datacentre, public- cloud hosting of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Uni ed Communications.
To ensure a robust infrastructure, all these services are secured with Castleton’s backup and disaster recovery platform, all connected via a new software-de ned WAN and wireless LAN. As part of Grand Union Housing’s move to a more modern working environment, sta hardware is being refreshed
with around 200 state-of-the-art Dell laptops, managed by Castleton’s mobile device and user environment management solutions.
Simon Penaluna, IT director, Grand Union Housing, said, “Castleton’s IT and network infrastructure will set us up for the future, enabling us to achieve our ambitions and our ‘customer
2020’ strategy by allowing our sta to work in an agile way on an e cient and resilient technology platform.”
Dean Dickinson, CEO, Castleton Technology, said, “After our recent £1 million investment in developing our datacentre facilities, we’re in a great position to ful l our customers’ demands for robust, exible and scalable multi-cloud platforms. This new project with Grand Union Housing absolutely demonstrates this capability.”
Paul Sexton, CTO, Castleton Technology, said, “With concerns around security, latency, vendor lock-in and cost-control, there is a desire for organisations to have a more balanced distributed workload across edge, private cloud and public cloud environments through a multi-cloud deployment. This ensures the greatest RoI from their IT spend and mitigates the risks associated with individual clouds.”

MOBILEWORKING?Castleton adds Localz
‘Find My Engineer’ solution
Location and mobile technology experts Localz have been announced as a new so ware partner for Castleton Technology, with the addition of its ‘Find My Engineer’ solution to Castleton’s existing suite of housing so ware.
Ian Stewart, commercial sales manager, Castleton Technology,?said, “With an average of 20 per cent failed appointments and each failed appointment costing up to £100, it is vital for housing providers to reduce the wasted time and costs associated with
these failed appointments in order to improve services for their tenants. Our partnership with Localz will help our customers achieve this objective.”
The ‘Find My Engineer’ solution provides the ultimate transparency by giving customers access to real-time location tracking and ETAs when the operative
is on their way. Localz research shows that 65 per cent of consumers say that viewing their service provider’s ETA is the most important feature on a service provider’s mobile app.
Housing providers using the ‘Find My Engineer’ solution will also benefitfrom reduced inbound calls to theircall centres, such as frustrated tenants asking, “My loo is blocked but I need to pick up my children from school – what’s the ETA of my plumber?”, and replacing it instead with a real-time map tracking their engineer so they can see if they’re 10 minutes away or 2 hours away.
Localz customer portfolio includes British Gas, who achieved a 17 per cent increase in the rst-time access rate of its engineers through the Localz platform.
Charles Bullock, partnership director, Localz, said, “Localz’s new partnership with Castleton Technology demonstrates its ongoing drive to innovate. The integration of our ‘on my way’ technology into its housing management solutions offers not only increased productivity savings for its housing customers but also a great customer experience for those housing providers’ tenants.”

The trade mag, out today. Couple articles re. Castleton. Not new to us, but being brought to attention of IT managers. I'll put them up anyway.

It was not my intention to particularly highlight cost of gas capture - this seems generally beyond existing aspirations. Future liftings are anticipated to provide positive cash at project level. This will be offset against administration and anticipated debt financing for any future AJE development and other projects.

https://www.energymixreport.com/aje-field-heavily-constrained-by-costs-low-production/

I'm watching developments. If they chose it, new shares via a placing would assist with working capital, but as MXO said, would be wholly insufficient to fund Phase 2 of the AJE field development, from theirs and partners perspectives.

Unless they change direction entirely, subject to satisfactory reports, they will continue with AJE Phase 2, and then potentially full field development, as a platform from which to go forward. The funding required is such that partners were seeking debt funding, and the then MXO said it was 'exploring the option to secure project financing at the asset level'. ( presumably, that may be where Al Maktoum comes in ) Following exploratory discussions in H1, the partners expected to make a decision quickly on Phase 2.

Another two sets, different volumes. So perhaps £618k worth there. Seller and buyer doesn't really matter. Point for pi's is they're starting again at this price.

Another £158k worth, maybe twice that if not double reported. Seller and buyer content at 102.5 again.

If brokered and traded outside the MMs, trades still have to be reported to the market, and he has to notify the market.

I see it's just come through on here now.

Bit of a mess-up there. Should be a holdings for Chelverton, going from 5.39% to 4.79%. Hadn't expected that, thought more likely shares being passed from Kestrel to new buyer. However, they've been taken up by somebody in line with previous post.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32014R0596
See Article 19

8. Paragraph 1 shall apply to any subsequent transaction once a total amount of EUR 5 000 has been reached within a calendar year. The threshold of EUR 5 000 shall be calculated by adding without netting all transactions referred to in paragraph 1.

The company, ie Oliver, has three business days to report director share sales. They were reported the following day last time. So probably no sales between 1st. July and yesterday I would think? ( wait for the RNS though )
I would also add that this company yet consists of the MXO directors as key personnel, of which he is one, and an 'average' of 5 employees earning £44k between them.

£350k ( 0.42% )changed hands at 102.5 - little bit higher than the last lot at £1. Major shareholder having to pay more for them. Shares starting again.

Alexa finding it's way into government thinking through DHSC, who want to enable digital involvement by less able users. Tenant support is always a matter of concern for associations. Castleton is first mover and the only provider with Alexa in the sector, through it's partnership with Housing Solutions, who will provide referenceability.

http://www.techmarketview.com/ukhotviews/archive/2019/07/10/alexa-to-provide-nhs-verified-health-advice

Also coming out of that presentation as a throwaway really was the amount of cash coming in through the Maintain solution for customers and contractors.

There's a promotional video just out on that much enhanced Castleton Maintain end to end solution. I'm thinking they're particularly keen on this product, first mentioned here
https://www.castletonplc.com/news/castleton-rolls-out-first-end-to-end-integrated-maintenance-solution/
having partnered with Find My Engineer (and Gas Tag ) and also sorted AI Alexa to complement it. They're hosting a discussion at and sponsoring the National Housing Federation Asset Management & Maintenance Conference on 22nd. October.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qlzAVUe3xIE&ebc=ANyPxKqY76lyPJdx0uSOvmmBtbk3XJL2Xxrv69DRWZ_s0_RsnyMeYhMtEzOOugmL1Vco5VdfGwSjJsKU2XJ95dnDmb_v3RZYkg&time_continue=138

Looking ahead, and bearing in mind the difference between Al Maktoums entry price and the current price ( with no material change in company circumstances ) and if there is an equity funding, as seems indicated, then that could be fairly conducted by a rights issue or open offer. Pure speculation.

I'm not suggesting they would use that old one mind. It would be in contravention of current thinking.

Thanks for that. Although the renewal of authority was subject of a General Meeting, and was not passed, on looking at it again, the authority granted at AGM on 17th. August 2018 ( £354,270 nominal ) was not revoked, renewed or varied, and thus I think remains valid until the forthcoming AGM.