There was a very positive update from one of our original batch of Little British Battlers, Edinburgh-based Sumerian, which provides analytics for operational IT. Existing backer Scottish Equity Partners has increased its investment in the company, and alongside Scottish Investment Bank, has announced a further £2.4m investment. The funding is to support the launch of Sumerian’s Workbench product, a SaaS-delivered IT analytics platform for operational IT.
During 2012 Sumerian rejigged its hosted services-based business in the light of rising demand for lower cost, short term project work and invested in its technology to better support self-service analytic applications (see here). Workbench is one of the outputs. The move to SaaS puts Sumerian into a better market position, as we had previously called out scalability as a limiting factor for the company - SaaS opens up access without demanding additional on-going resource from Sumerian. Currently in open beta, organisations can try Workbench before they buy, which will help set up a pipeline for future subscriptions. We wish Sumerian well.