Certainly not 'head in the clouds' as hosting and cloud company iomart Group plc profits rise 618%!

iomart Group plc, the managed hosting and cloud computing services company, has just announced a very healthy 618% rise in profit before tax to the London Stock Exchange.

The company’s financial results year ending 31 March 2011 showed profit before tax rose to £2.8m (2010:£0.4m, before gain reduction in deferred consideration of £09m). iomart Group’s revenue also showed a big increase, up 38% to £25.3m from £18.3m in the previous financial year.

The majority of growth announced by the Glasgow-head-quartered company came from its hosting (http://iomarthosting.com) operations which generated revenue of £17.7m, a rise of 61% from £11.0m in 2010. This figure includes revenues from the acquisition in November 2010 of Titan Internet for £4.2m, however even taking into account this purchase, hosting revenue still jumped by 47% with many customers looking specifically for cloud-based and enterprise hosting solutions.

Angus MacSween, CEO of iomart Group plc, said: “Cloud computing is something of a buzz word with many companies who add the ‘cloud’ tag to everything they do, yet don't back it up with reliable delivery mechanisms.

“At iomart we have built our technologies from the ground up specifically to be delivered via cloud. As a result we are becoming recognised as an authority on the provision of cloud-hosting solutions and are well positioned to take advantage as the market evolves and people look for reliable vendors.”

iomart Hosting won 400 new orders over the course of the year, many of which were additional orders from existing customers. Increasingly these orders include some aspect of cloud or virtual computing in the overall solution package.

Angus MacSween added: “With more businesses looking to the cloud for their data solutions we believe we have positioned ourselves well to take advantage of this market moving forward. We are in a market that is growing and that is here to stay and we fully expect to participate strongly in that growth.”