Irish IT service providers report increases in revenues

New accounts show boost for Arkphire and Data Solutions, but Ammeon records loss

IT spending is on the rebound, with several Irish technology services providers reporting big jumps in turnover.

Coming a day after John Purdy’s Ergo reported record revenues of €68.4 million for the year ending March 2018, a number of other IT services companies also released full-year accounts.

IT consulting and managed-services company Arkphire, whose partners include EMC, Dell and Cisco, reported a rise in revenues to €90.1 million for the year ending June 30th, 2018, up from €74.1 million in 2017.

Pretax profits jumped to €4.4 million from €2.7 million for the Dublin-based company, which secured a multimillion euro investment from Bregal Milestone last October.

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Arkphire is ranked as one of the fastest-growing companies in Ireland and across Europe with turnover having jumped from €20 million over the last four years.

The company was one of eight Irish firms ranked on the Financial Times's FT100 list last year, which rated European organisations that achieved the highest percentage growth in revenues between 2013 and 2016.

Newly filed accounts show Arkphire employed 82 people last year, up from 76 in 2017. Staff costs rose from €4.9 million to €5.6 million.

Specialist IT distributor Data Solutions Holdings recorded a 32 per cent rise in turnover from €27.8 million to €36.6 million in the 12 months to the end of March. This is somewhat under the €40 million claimed by the company previously but marks a 32 per cent revenue increase versus the prior year.

Big clients

The Dublin-headquartered company, established in 1991, provides solutions across mobility, virtualisation, security, networking and enterprise cloud. Clients include VHI and UniPrint.

The company employed 28 people last year with staff costs totalling €2.1 million.

Separately, IT professional services company Ammeon, which announced 100 new jobs in 2018, reported a €1.8 million pretax loss last year after revenues declined almost €5 million to €11.4 million.

A year earlier the company had reported pretax profits of €519,595 on revenues of €16.3 million.

The group was founded in 2003. In 2017 it employed 126 people, with staff costs of €8.5 million.

Ammeon chief executive Fred Jones said the company experienced a downturn during the year but had bounced back in 2018.

“In 2018 the company’s revenues have grown by 30 per cent and we have returned to profitability. During 2018 we have also hired an additional 100 new staff,” he said.

“Our outlook for 2019 is for similar growth in both revenues and staff numbers. The growth in our business is being fuelled by a combination of revenues in the areas of DevOps, automation and AI,” Mr Jones added.

Charlie Taylor

Charlie Taylor

Charlie Taylor is a former Irish Times business journalist