Coms banishes past woes with RedstoneConnect rebrand

'We wanted to make sure everyone knows we are moving away from everything Coms was' says CEO Mark Braund

Coms has changed its name to RedstoneConnect as it looks to disassociate itself entirely from the loss-making telecoms operations it sold off last year.

The new name is based on the Redstone networking and cabling business Coms acquired in 2013 and which became its sole operating division after it sold its albatross comms reseller business to Timico in May 2015.

"Redstone is the only piece that's left of the group when I arrived in March last year as non-executive chairman with a management team that was looking to rescue a difficult situation," CEO Mark Braund told CRN.

"We're no longer anything to do with telecommunications. We do provide the network infrastructure for telecoms, but we're not a telecoms company, so it's important we put that past behind us and reflect exactly where we are going."

Where the London-listed firm is going, Braund said, is full tilt into the smart building space, a market one analyst forecasts will be worth $36bn by 2020. In March, the company bolstered its efforts in this area by acquiring smart building software player Connect IB for £1.3m in March.

"We wanted to make sure everyone knows we are moving away from everything Coms was and into this brave new world of being a technology and solution provider of smart buildings and smart spaces," Braund said.

"We are the only company now of our scale that is able to take a building through its journey from the very beginning, before the spade hits the green grass on a greenfield site, right the way through to designing and integrating the right network for that building to become smart and managing and supporting those networks."

Braund reeled of Westfield shopping centre and the Rugby World Cup as among key reference customers.

For its financial year ending 31 January 2016, RedstoneConnect saw EBITDA from continuing operations hit £1.3m, above management expectations, as revenues from continuing operations rose 36 per cent to £40.1m. One-off costs pushed it to an operating loss of £0.7m, however.

Asked about the impact of Brexit, Braund admitted "leaping into the unknown" would be tough for everyone, but suggested RedstoneConnect could actually be a beneficiary given it offers some solutions that are designed to cut real estate costs.

"The solutions we are bringing to market will help companies become more agile," he said. "This is especially true of [Redstone's occupancy management solution] OneSpace, which is about reducing reliance on large amounts of real estate to give yourself agility, which I think will be needed as we go through this next era."