Scotland IT services specialist iomart is going from strength to strength, currently paying its first interim dividend after its growing customer-base lifted its half-year profits by 9%. The firm is also finalising its takeover of Salford-based hosting firm Sonassi.

Founder and Chief Executive Angus MacSween has now revealed plans for the firm to move further into e-commerce, offering consumers a wider range of software products. The company already caters for over 120,000 customers on its hosting platform.

Overall revenue for the six months leading to September 30^th increased by 12% to £47 million, and the firm has asserted that its, “market opportunity remains significant”. Additionally, revenue at its main cloud computing division increased by 13% to £40.3 million, while the company’s Easyspace online hosting brand, focused on smaller businesses, increased its revenue 2.3% to £6.7 million.

The acquisition of Sonassi, is a deal which could be worth up to £16.5 million to iomart. MacSween claims that the deal earmarks iomart’s expansion in the solutions market, following the purchase of another e-commerce firm, Tier 9, in July 2017. MacSween said: “We have always been involved in retail, but we are now starting to focus on a number of applications, as well as underlying infrastructure, not just ecommerce software but the plugs-ins to that, whether it is email marketing and couriers through to stock control.

“We are going to put a bit more focus and attention to become a bigger player in what we think is a significantly growing part of the market.”

Benjamin Lessani, Founder of Sonassi, said: “As part of iomart we will have access to the best infrastructure, connectivity, and skillset there is. It’s a very exciting move for us and we’re looking forward to working with Angus and his team to create a market-leading e-commerce hosting division.”

MacSween asserted that iomart will continue to expand and claims to have been eyeing up further deals. He added: “If you are doing anything online nowadays, your market is really global and you can sell to anywhere if you have the mechanisms in place.”

“We get offered an awful lot of things to buy, but pull out of 99 out of every 100 we get offered. We have identified a few more [acquisitions] as the market is still remarkably fragmented. We have been around so long that we are now buying businesses that only started in the last four or five years.”

iomart operates eight datacentres in the UK with a further 19 locations internationally.