Customer engagement software player Netcall closed off a strong year, after a buoyant H1 (see Netcall still sitting comfortably), with revenue up 10% to £16.1m, and organic growth doubling from 3% to 6%. The bottom line is also heading in the right direction. Before all the nasty bits, the adjusted margin was up from 22% to 25%, meanwhile pre-tax profits (including the nasty bits) were still up 10% to £2.3m, holding the margin steady at 14%.
Netcall is being driven by a strong performance from its existing products and services (up 16% yoy), and a 7% uptick in recurring business. SaaS numbers on the face of it appear slow at 3%. However this figure includes the declining Movieline business. From our chat with management this morning, it is clear underlying SaaS revenues are going well and would have been up 15% yoy. This is what we would expect to see as Netcall shifts its business model from the traditional licence model to SaaS subscriptions.
Netcall increasingly appears to be play in the business process automation space where we see big opportunities for suppliers (see Is business process automation a BPO industry game changer?). For instance its appointment management lifecycle solution is used by NHS trusts to help automate the manual intensive process of patient appointment bookings, changes and cancellations. CE Henrik Bang told us that there has been good progress here this year, and today one in five acute trusts or health boards use the system to send 45,000 reminders daily. That must be saving hospitals a lot of time and effort.
During the year, Netcall also launched Liberty, the next gen version of its core platform, which includes an embedded version of its BPM suite. Netcall now covers multichannel contact handling solutions, from IVR (interactive voice response) and speech recognition for contact centres, workflows for managing content assets, to CRM for customer service and BPM for optimising processes.
Netcall has a clear focus to continue cross-selling and up-selling products and services into its existing customer base of 700 organisations, where it claims a large share have a limited number of its solutions. That’s a large number of accounts to grow into. It’s easy then to see why Bang sees acquisitions as an ‘important component of Netcall’s growth strategy’ to come.