Freestyle IT toasts turnover spike

Virtualisation VAR bucks trend by logging 50 per cent annual sales increase

Storage and virtualisation VAR Freestyle IT has closed the books on a bumper 2010 in which turnover leapt by a half.

The Hook-based mid-market specialist claims its focus on virtualisation kept it insulated from the frosty market conditions as sales for the 12 months to 31 December rose from £5m to £7.4m year on year.

Director Warwick Everett (pictured) said: “A lot of our customers had held off large capital expenditure but reached a point where they couldn’t hold off any longer and renewed their infrastructure. And being in the field of virtualisation makes it a much easier argument for the IT department [to sell to their boards].”

Gross profit for the year grew 74 per cent to £1.28m, said Everett.

He added that Freestyle was profiting from a growing trend among mid-market firms to turn to solution providers for specialist skills, as their internal IT departments become leaner and technologies more complex.

“Citrix, Microsoft and VMware now have very specialised products,” he said. “A generic IT person is not in a position to design, support and install all the latest and greatest from these vendors.”

Everett listed HDS and HP as key hardware allies, although he added that Freestyle was doing a lot more work with Dell.