SUMERIAN, the technology business founded by Scottish data entrepreneur David Sibbald, has highlighted the global growth potential of its IT capacity planning software as it unveiled Stuart McCaul as its new chief commercial officer.

 

Mr McCaul has joined Edinburgh-based Sumerian from EMC2 as it enjoys revenue growth of 80 per cent year on year.

The company declined to provide specific figures on its turnover growth. But Mr McCaul said Sumerian, is poised for rapid expansion on the back of its service model software product.

The monthly subscription service allows companies to make accurate IT capacity projections, with predictive analytics that take account of business growth and future IT change built in.

The software incorporates "scenario modelling", allowing IT departments to prepare for events in businesses that may put their systems under pressure.

So far the bulk of the firm's clients are in the global financial services sector, including one of the world's biggest banks. However it has recently been taken on by Gilead, a major bio-tech firm based in Southern California.

Mr McCaul indicated that further growth is realistic in the healthcare and pharmaceuticals spheres given its link to sister company Aridhia, the health informatics specialist also founded by Sibbald.

He said: "The market opportunity that Sumerian is now looking forward to taking is really significant. They are working in a space called strategic IT capacity planning, which is an area that has suffered from under-investment until now.

"The result of that is IT organisations are fighting fires [and] inundated with incidents all day long.

"If they take a strategic capacity approach, they will get out of that fire fighting mode and they will deliver a much better service to their customers, reduce costs, reduce risk and so on.

"Sumerian is the only company really ready to take advantage of this move towards strategic capacity planning. It also has the advantage that the market is small, and so are Sumerian, but the market is about to grow 300 per cent per year, according to Gartner, the IT industry analyst."

Mr McCaul said Sumerian has been transformed from a consultancy to a software company with the development of the product. And he said it is preparing to capitalise on its growth potential by expanding its headcount by about a third in the next 12 months. It currently has 45 staff on its books.

Mr McCaul said: "The hires will be in technology and also in sales and marketing. We are really investing in sales and marketing to take the company to market in a big way, and really focus on growing the business."