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Not quite £900k as they have been given £500k between them of options at 1p with no targets other than to say for 12 months so that covers salary. The question has to be why does a company of this size even need 2 CEO's?

Wholeheartedly agree and have said the same myself. Companies do credit check their suppliers during evaluation and it would be madness to take such a risk.

I originally said real value in market cap at £5- £7m but the latest round of funding required and cost savings made me change my mind on that. Although official figures not published they have said that turnover and MRR remain flat on the previous 6 months and they have still gone through £1m in cash. I still do not think what they have done this time is enough and they are now staring down the barrel of this financial year showing 0 growth. they need customer wins and growth to show the market they can make this work. What is worrying for them is they have doubled there partner base which means double the cost to support an invest in them and still the numbers aren't going up. If they really have 500 partners, i can get the new 250 are getting up to speed but what about the existing 250? Surely they are doing some business? If each one did £100 a month of MRR every month for 6 months that would total £150,000 MRR and show a 25% Growth. Or have they got a lot of churn? If so why? Surely with such good products and and a hot market that should be easily achievable. They are going to need more funding within 6 months at this rate. All of these types of companies are after MRR so someone would buy it and amalgamate it on to their platform but they aren't going to pay a lot for it so yes I think single figures are possible and then it will be acquired. Lets not forget that year 1 was practically 0 growth if you take out the under the radar Rise migration, that was never publicly mentioned, that Andy B bought with him and now this year is looking the same..

It is a shame there isn't a trading update or any significant customer wins to go with it.

Sadly Exchange will go EOL the quickest as mainstream requirements for mail are very siple and O365 gets more ad more integrated and price will inevitably go down. Agree on SharePoint but also if you look at what they have done with their Dynamics channel and the recent changes for AX, Nav and GP you will see that if they cant get the partners to take them where they want to go at pace then they will go there themselves.

They are always happy to do a deal and invest in partners when it suits them but when the strategy changes they are big enough to go it alone. Look at all the noise when they made SBS EOL and replaced it with Foundation server and Office 365. At first partners couldn't bill O365 they could only get commission back from MS and under the agreement MS can stop paying that at any time. They then relented and released O365 on open but that is only 12 months up front and hard for partners to compete against a monthly model direct with the vendor. They have just launched a tender process to trial self billing for some partners globally but only a few will be selected in each country. Not sure if this is a move to give control back to the partners or just to be seen to placate us all while they continue to build direct. This is the next step on from the current syndication partners, of which in the UK the main hosting company with UK syndication rights is Inty (OUT were not accepted) O365 is already a $1bn a year business to MS and they say it will be the fastest growing product in MS history to reach $2bn annually.

MS have released some detail of the upcoming changes o the partner program and the new requirements. A couple to note that reiterate my earlier post on MS moving on. Cloud Essentials and Cloud Accelerate competencies will be retired on the 30/9/2014 "However, we are replacing the programs with two new competencies, Small and Midmarket Cloud Solutions and Cloud Productivity, and are very excited about the potential of these new programs to help our partners capitalize even further on the cloud. After September 30, 2014, visit the Partner Center to choose your new competency, view the associated requirements, and sign up. Also, in FY15, partners can earn incentives for selling, deploying and managing Online Services solutions and driving consumption of Microsoft Azure Services. Please visit the Microsoft Partner Incentives page for more details." "The current Small Business competency becomes Small and Midmarket Cloud Solutions. There are thousands of partners with the current Small Business competency that will need to meet the new certifications. In MS words this is what they say about the new competency. The Small Business competency is evolving to become a cloud-focused competency and will be renamed Small and Midmarket Cloud Solutions. The Small and Midmarket Cloud Solutions competency enables you to capitalize on the demand from the small and mid-market customer marketplace for cloud and hybrid solutions built on Microsoft Office 365, providing you with additional support and incentives as you grow your business. Partners will be able to earn this competency by providing customer references and by meeting specific sales performance requirements—specifically, Office 365 seats sold and customer adds, plus customer references and technical exams at the Gold level." No details yet of the Cloud Productivity but clearly shows that MS are driving their cloud push on their own platforms, O365 and Azure. they are also making a whole load of other changes around other competencies and the CRM one is changing to focus a lot more on MS CRM online. Voice break out for Lync coming shortly for O365 and then the game changes again.

When OUT set off on this journey their strategy was right for the vendors and the market at that point in time. Everyone was talking cloud and MS and other vendors were looking at ways to get a slice of the action. It was much easier to support these small funded startups to get a slice of the action why they got their act together. OUT were MS hosted partner of the year and HP were prepared to offer significant discounts to help them build their own cloud. Wind forward to today and the market has matured and attitudes have shifted. Cloudamour (another UK startup) are the MS worldwide partner of the year 2014. Decent outfit and well funded but very small in revenue terms. What makes them so different is they do not have data centres or their own kit or sell any of their own hosted services, they are a solitons provider (aggregator). They resell MS and others such as Google, Amazon and Cisco cloud services. They take the best of each companies offering and build a robust solution for their customers without having the expensive overheard or the lack of impartiality their own infrastructure would bring. Also worth noting that the new secure O Cloud is being built in conjunction with Dell, Why? Price. If the relationship with HP was so strategic why wouldn't they cut them a deal? HP already have overtaken OUT in this space and have IL3 capability on G Cloud so no longer need to offer special deals to not miss out in this market. You could draw the comparison of the days when IT resellers built their own PC's. Now days we all buy from Lenovo, HP, Dell etc and resell as the margins are so tight and without the economies of scale you can't make money. Cloud will go, is going, the same way. The likes of Amazon, Google, MS have huge existing revenue streams to fund this market. Sure they will always be new entrants to the market that gain success but OUT won't be one as the dont have anything unique. Building your own cloud is not the answer. Using the cloud as a platform to build services on is where the money is at. Look at BOX, Instagram, Yammer etc. OUT will claim they can be that platform but they are too small and too late. The major vendors are already there and the big resellers rackspace, kelway, softcat are already way ahead.

Unfortunately I am not. The cons outweigh the benefits especially when you have decent private equity backing.

But surely this latest OUT and Microsoft article is laughable. http://www.outsourcery.co.uk/News/PR/Pages/Outsourcery-Participates-in-CityNext.aspx OUT can't just keep associating themselves with MS, HP, Dell, Voda etc and expect that to be enough. Is there really any value in a £7m turnover cash burning business helping to shape the cities of the future? They can't even get their own business model right and lack focus. If I could say one thing to PL and co that would be get some focus guys. a £7m turnover business isn't big enough to be the market leader in CRM, O365, O Cloud, Secure O Cloud, G Cloud, Lync. While working on initiatives like this and managing a 500 strong partner channel and a direct public sector sales team. Your pockets aren't deep enough to fish in such a big pond. You need to pick your targets and go after them and then you might stand a chance. The strategy of firing enough arrows in the hope one may hit is going to continue to cost you cash and you don't have enough!!!

In fairness to Damon hernia a really nice guy but from a services background. I believe he came from BT Engage. He started at OUT as the services director and since then in don't think there is a job he hasn't done. He is not a sales director though and doesn't have a sales background so imagine this will be a short lived role.....

This is just spam and the announcement was the same as a previous spam link that talks about investment from overseas companies. Nothing specific to OUT.

Posted on the EIT board.

Look forward to seeing the contract win announcements in the next few months.... Worth bearing in mind that HP will have a hardware relationship with the customer. The customer will already have a comms relationship with another provider who no doubt will be pushing their particular flavour if UC. This may drive some business but IMHO this isn't a golden goose, however let's wait and see.

Hi, I know them well and come up against them a few times. Decent outfit and a good team running it but the trouble with these businesses is scale. The hard part for all MSP type companies is finding good sales people to grow the business. There are a load of IT services companies that turnover around £5m that can't or don't scale because they give a good lifestyle to their owners and the desire isn't always there. You often find the sales director has some shares and he is the best salesperson and won't leave as will want to one day cash out. There are a few companies in the space that have tried to do buy and build of these sort of companies but few have made it to profitability yet.

I don't work at out I got this off Google... Announce my in July 13 on Outs website wen names the partners who will implement and support. http://www.outsourcery.co.uk/News/PR/Pages/Outsourcery-delivers-UC-to-SMBs.aspx Now in this announcement on their website they make the bold claim of this being the first time, really? http://www.outsourcery.co.uk/News/PR/Pages/Lync-provides-cost-effective-UC-for-HP’s-clients.aspx “For the first time, this new initiative will give HP’s SMB customers access to Outsourcery’s Unified Lync offering - at a very viable price point, and from a trusted HP partner,” comments Piers Linney, Co-CEO of Outsourcery. “60% of businesses plan to deploy Lync in the next year and our Microsoft-based Unified Lync solution has been proven to improve communication and collaboration in businesses of all sizes.” How can you be so dumb as to put something like that in a current release when your news archives show the same partnership with HP an year ago???

Yeah I heard that in July 13 also. http://m.techradar.com/news/internet/cloud-services/outsourcery-to-offer-unified-comms-through-hp-chanel-partners-1165835 Same message different names from HP and OUT

Yeah I heard that in July 13 also. http://m.techradar.com/news/internet/cloud-services/outsourcery-to-offer-unified-comms-through-hp-chanel-partners-1165835

Thanks for your message and hopefully I have saved some people a few quid. Some would do well to recognise it isn't my postings on here that have driven the price through the ground. I just give my own view on the facts and throw a bit of industry knowledge in that anyone who was in the sector would know.

Do you really think that anything posted on these boards will drive down the share price? That is clearly a delusional statement. I have never said I don't know PL and others at OUT but have made clear I have never worked there, or ever would. If you read back you will know that from the very first time I met them I knew this was all hype. The business model wouldn't work the way they said and PL has no idea about technology or this industry. Watched the story unfold and sat through endless BS presentations at channel events where they were in attendance. Spoke to them on many occasions and it is clear they just don't get it but saw it as a way to jump on the bandwagon and make a quick buck, but have come unstuck. I have no problem with people doing that but spinning a story to get there and reeling a load of people in and then coming unstuck gives me a little satisfaction. Always been clear on my views of them and when they listed this forum have me an outlet to make my views public, which I have done. You don't need to read them or agree with them but since listing they have missed projection after projection and keep rewriting the story. This is no different to what PL and co have been doing since launch only now the public fanfare is falling flat on its face. You can only fool people so long...... Where is the £100m turnover in 2015? Where are the Datacenters in the Far East to support the global Pearsons deal? Virgin and Voda were signed as partners over a year ago, why the delay in on-boarding them? The share price dropping from 120 to 20p show me that the market tends to agree with me.