We haven’t written about Atlantic Global before but as another little British battler this Yorkshire-based business has been quietly going about its business for 16 years, providing people and project management software to the likes of GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and Aviva (Norwich Union). Its future path is up in the air however. Following two confidential preliminary expressions of interest, it has formally put the sale notice up.
The company provides a range of applications in the professional services automation, project portfolio management and organisation planning software areas, as on premise solutions but increasingly via the SaaS model. Growth in this area may have been the spark for the potential bidders.
Although Atlantic Global did not publish SaaS revenue in its H1 interims, it did say it had grown and that 41 of its 120 customers are using its SaaS platform, which has been the recipient of much of the company’s R&D investment. PSA-type management solutions (the company also provides expense management and timesheet capabilities) and SaaS are an excellent match as they attract high numbers of (often) non-office based users. Yesterday we wrote about Kimble (see Kimble takes PSA to the cloud ) who is in the early stages of building its professional services management on the back of the SaaS model.
As for Atlantic Global, although its revenue for the six months to June 30 2011 was just £703K (compared to £728K for H1 2010), pre tax profit was up from £21K to £33K – small but heading in the right direction. The EPS was 0.15p compared to 0.1p. Given those numbers and the length of time it has been in business, an acquisition could be what it needed to kick start further growth.
As well as its application and its SaaS business, its customer base will be attractive to potential bidders – new SaaS customers include FriendsLife, The Lewis Group, Happy Customer, TAH Limited, Jalios and it has devlivered more on premise implementations at Specsavers and Serco Transport. A deal struck with Baker Tilly means it will start marketing the Global Atlantic solution to its existing professional services customers.
It will be interesting to see who the interested parties are. It is unlikely to be one of the tier one software vendors but could someone like Concur, or ClickTime, or SaaS-based NetSuite who has a PSA interest.