RE: IT1 Aug 2014 14:53
I have said before that between £5m and £7m market cap they become value to me because they had £600k recurring revenue at the end of last year. Every provider now wants MRR and needs to show MRR growth so that has a value and I am sure some of the players would pay over £5m and just engulf it to their own platform.
It is a bit like what OUT did when they took over the Rise platform. They closed it all down and integrated services to their own. The difference is they didn't mention it and the base wasn't large enough to make a significant dent in their ongoing costs.
What niggles me now and we wont know until next month when we see the HY results is why the revised revenue forecast for FY14 and FY 15 so early in the year. My view is that they have some contract losses and the bigger contracts are not proving as fruitful as they may have once thought / announced.
They have had a lot of issues and not to mention an entire clear out of staff: Product Director, Sales Director, Head of Channel, head of Infrastructure, Head of operations and Head of Marketing.
All the issues with the platform and the personnel shift, with which a lot of relationships would have gone, Will make large companies feel uneasy and may have slowed or even halted progressing in the cloud with Out. They made a load of noise about Pearsons and how they were going to expand globally to support this contract and since the original announcement there has been nothing. If this was going really well and producing increasing levels of MRR you would think a follow up announcement rather than another unnamed larger customer full of potential.
As I have said all along. The cloud is the way to go and it will eventually become profitable for some but the problem always comes in funding it to break even. So many large companies with deep pockets and alternative revenue streams to fund the investment are already there and OUT are now lagging behind. HP are one of the IL3 G cloud suppliers and Vodafone have a whole load of their own offerings. Out did have the jump on most people with Full Enterprise Voice on Lync but now there are much bigger, well funded companies doing it better and cheaper.
If they can fund it then long term they will eventually get to break even and get bought but the PR and Bull from Piers may just have backfired on him and this wont get anywhere other than a fire sale or get taken back private.
I will keep a keen eye but in the words of Theo Pathitis "I am not giving you a penny of my kids inheritance"