Scottish cloud computing company Iomart has said trading profits and revenues in its first half will be well ahead of same period last year, and highlighted new market opportunities.
The Glasgow firm, which provides solutions across the cloud spectrum - including private, public and hybrid - said that the choices for businesses considering a move to the cloud are "ever more complex".
Iomart declared in its pre-close trading statement: "Many industries and sectors are only now at the start of the journey to the cloud, which means that the market opportunity remains strong and varied.
"Through our continued investments into the business and successful acquisition of complementary skills and customer bases, we are increasingly well positioned to take advantage of the opportunity and the board is confident in the outlook for the full year and beyond."
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Iomart, now on course to reach the £100 million mark, said ahead of its trading results for the six months ending September 30, 2018 that the grounding "leaves us well positioned to take advantage of these opportunities and we have continued to win good levels of new business from both new and existing customers in the period".
"The reorganisation of our sales and marketing team and structure was successfully completed in the period and we are confident that we will see these efforts starting to filter through into the sales pipeline for the second half and beyond."
The firm unveiled revenue growth of nine per cent to £97.7m for the year ended March 31 in July. Profit before tax was up 7% to £24m.
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Angus MacSween, chief executive of Iomart Group plc, said: "Iomart’s continued strong trading performance is a reflection of the strength of our cloud capabilities and business model, the breadth of our customer base and the ongoing growth of the cloud market.
"With a significant and sustainable market opportunity ahead of us, a growing sales pipeline and high levels of revenue visibility, we look to the second half of the year and beyond with confidence.”
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Martin O'Sullivan, Shore Capital analyst, said: "We note that the average of analyst forecasts for the current year is for Revenue and Adjusted EBITDA to be in the region of 10% and 11% growth respectively; and whilst we do not expect material upwards movement in these estimates, expectations appear well underpinned at this point with a chance of upside as we move through the second half.
"We believe growth is being driven the Cloud Services division, following on from 10% revenue growth in 2018, as our checks indicate the sustainability of structural growth in cloud provision."
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