Significant interest in Outsourcery before GCI deal agreed

CRN understands more than half a dozen firms looked at the firm

Outsourcery has formally appointed administrators and sold its assets to GCI Networks, ending a process which CRN understands to have attracted significant interest from other firms.

Outsourcery non-executive director Andy Burton confirmed to CRN that the administration, which was a pre-pack, formally happened at 10:30am on Thursday, a day after its stock exchange announcement which suggesting a deal could be done that day.

But the official announcement of the sale and appointment of Sam Woodward and Simon Edel of Ernst & Young was only made yesterday afternoon.

GCI's CEO Adrian Thirkill said Outsourcery has some "great underlying characteristics" and "some very talented people".

Outsourcery's recent news came as a surprise to few, not least because back in April it admitted it needed more cash for "short-term working capital purposes" and so was looking at alternative options, including the disposal of non-strategic assets and restructuring.

CRN understands that more than half a dozen companies took a serious look at Outsourcery in recent weeks. UKFast was among them, but yesterday its CEO Lawrence Jones explained to CRN that a number of reasons, including its "unhealthy" relationship with Vodafone and worries top staff are leaving, meant he pulled out.

Outsourcery's non-exec director Burton told CRN that "a number" of firms were interested.

"Although time pressures were tight in the process to realise value from the assets, as was previously announced, there were originally a number of credible interested parties in the business," he said.

"The challenge was ultimately to fund the investment needed to reach sustainable cash flow and as such the options regrettably became limited."

He added that despite this challenge, the company had "world-class" operations.

"What the team built operationally in cloud-based UC and Skype for Business was, in my opinion, second to none," he said. "The team have been technically and operationally excellent, serving the needs of their partners and customers well. I believe that the purchase by GCI provides a logical and solid basis for the ongoing success and development of these operations.

"Outsourcery set out to differentiate and demonstrate how businesses can make use of cloud services to drive dramatic improvements in communication and collaboration across voice and data, and in that respect did a great job that very few have achieved."

In a statement, EY administrator Sam Woodward said the sale to GCI will save around 100 jobs, and outlined the challenges the firm faced.

"Over a number of years Outsourcery had invested significantly in its IT infrastructure and cost base in anticipation of strong revenue growth from its O-Cloud platform," he said. "In practice, the pace of revenue growth was below expectations resulting in Outsourcery suffering trading losses and cash flow pressure."