The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 list of fastest growing privately held UK tech firms revealed that is alongside the mobile app developers and B2C web site operators there were also fast growing data centre infrastructure, B2B SAAS solution and cloud hosting providers.
UKCloud, formerly Skyscape, topped the annual list having been founded by entrepreneurs who had already built data centre and hosting businesses.
By charging on a pay per use basis for storage, CPU and networking the Farnborough based services firm has tapped into a need for hybrid cloud services where workloads are delivered via third party equipment and data centres.
The list ranks its percentage of annual sales rise over the last three years at 262%. UKCloud had revenues of £31.1m and profits of £6.6m.
Sticking with data centres, Virtus data centres was named in the list at number 16. The data centre operator runs sites in Enfield in London, Slough and Hayes in Middlesex and saw sales grow 133%.
Fairsail, the SAAS HR applications provider was ranked at 21. The firm secured a £10m investment from UK software giant Sage in June.
Adam Hale, CEO, speaking before the list was published, told CBR that the investment would go into continued innovation in the product which is built on the Salesforce Force.com customer success platform, further investment in sales and marketing and continued expansion in the US and building a bigger ecosystem of partners and alliances.
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Fairsail includes Betfair (Paddy Power) and Mitsubishi among its client base. It provides a complete HR and human capital management platform.
“Human capital management done properly through a self-service SAAS model can be transformational for a business as it provides timely accurate, actionably information on people. Not just who they are but how they are doing, where are they and how they are performing. Once you have that information at your fingertips you’d never run business again without it,” says Mr Hale.
The firm grew by 114% with Mr Hale saying its core development team will grow to over 20 this year.
Of the Tech Track 100 from 2015, 44 companies continued with strong growth and appeared again on the list in 2016.
These included Ve Interactive, the ecommerce technology developer, which was number 1 in 2015 and reached number 10 in growth this year.
Cloudreach, a cloud services provider ranked number 20 in 2015 and number 23 in 2016 with continued growth of over 100%.
The number of solutions or services firms which had cloud related activities directly built into in their model was around list over ten indicating a move to cloud is gathering momentum and growth is possible in the face of competition from cloud scale giants..
Software developers and service providers ranged from digital marketing platform providers to comparison web sites.
The IOT space saw some interesting growth firms on the list with Breathing Buildings which provides smart ventilation solutions making it onto list at 73. Electronic vehicle charging and vehicle tracking firms Chargemaster and Trak Global were listed with the fastest growing being Tantalum, an other vehicle tracking software firm which has been ranked at number 14 for two years running.
B2B solution providers included Ideal Networks and Manage 24/7, IT Lab, listed as IT Services providers.
B2C firms included LoveCrafts a community serves the $100bn craft industry, WorldRemit, a money transfer business, Green Man Gaming, a games retailer, FanDuel a fantasy sports games developer and several job search web sites.
The Sunday Times began its Tech Track List in 2001.
The Fast Track 100 is listed here.
