Kate and Nick Craig-Wood founded Memset in 2002 with a £2,000 investment. Indeed they still hold c90% of the equity and there are no external shareholders. Memset is a hosting and managed services provider with two data centres sited around Reading. Its hosting services are well regarded (indeed TechMarketView has good experience of its use of Memset services). They now claim 2,900 customers and host 20,000 web sites with customers including Debenhams and Hilton Hotels.
But, ten years on, Memset is still quite small. The company says that recent growth means it’s now passed a monthly run-rate of £300k, with total revenues up 36% since Q2 of 2011. It seems quite a bit of the growth is coming from cloud as well as from Memset’s web hosting activities. Cloud revenues - including virtual machine and storage services - now represent just over a third of turnover.
All of which goes to show that small players can find niches within the highly fragmented infrastructure services landscape. In a price-sensitive market where many clients are open to new supplier options, you could argue that the opportunities for Little British Battlers like Memset are as good as they have been for some time.
But what of the future? Will Memset continue to plough its own furrow? Alternatively, we could see them making a very attractive add-on to a number of larger hosting and more general infrastructure providers.