SoftwareONE enjoys UK sales boom

Software licensing specialist admits growing stature will lead to intensified competition as 2015 sales rise 78 per cent to £76.6m

SoftwareONE has admitted it can no longer fly under the radar of its UK competition after recording a huge jump in annual sales here.

The software licensing specialist saw UK sales mushroom 78 per cent to £76.6m in calendar 2015, according to its annual accounts, as a staff recruitment push fed into the top line.

Echoing sentiments expressed by its Swiss parent company at the time it sold a stake to investment firm KKR last summer, the accounts revealed that the UK business is focusing increasingly on cloud-based products. It recently made it onto a pan-European cloud framework for universities.

Having launched in 2008, Microsoft, Adobe, VMware and Citrix partner SoftwareOne's UK arm employed an average of 143 staff during the year, up from 117 a year earlier.

"2015 has seen the benefit of the staff investment in 2014, and the company therefore continued to invest in additional staff in 2015," the accounts stated.

"The directors are aware that the company's growth and increased awareness will make the competition more intense but are confident that the company continues to possess excellent differentiators, which can more than offset this."

An operating loss before tax of £550,000 in 2014 was reversed to a £333,000 profit this time around, and SoftwareONE said it expected its bottom line to continue swelling as the benefits of a graduate programme launched in 2014 start to bear fruit.

In 2015, it incurred costs of £823,000 from the graduate scheme, up from £519,000 a year earlier, but it will start producing returns this year, the company said.

"With the perspective of additional growth coming from the graduates and the investment in additional senior sales staff, the directors consider that the company will increase profitability in 2016," the report stated.

Headquartered in Stans, Switzerland, SoftwareONE specialises in the provision of software procurement, software agreement management services and software technical services to SMEs and enterprises, working with 5,000 software publishers.