Microgen Plc, the Windsor, UK-based document management company, claims its Axess application service provider business is one of the most successful in the UK, with revenue now topping 1m pounds ($1.6m) a year. After spending 6m pounds ($9.6m) on infrastructure over the past three years, Microgen says that Axess revenue in the first half of this year was 326% up on the same period last year and 88% up on the previous six months.
While new customers and additional applications are the key drivers of growth, Microgen says that recurring revenue is growing at around 15% per annum, due to increased customer use and the growth in the amount of data and documents stored on the outsourced database. Operating loss of the Axess service is now running at 130,000 pounds ($209,300) a month, down from a loss of 210,000 ($338,100) a year ago. As directors believe that no further investment will be necessary until at least the end of next year, a continued expansion in the customer base should pull the operation into the black.
Microgen’s operation is interesting because while a whole number of companies are announcing plans to move into the ASP arena, Microgen’s operation began in July 1997 and it is one of the few companies to have built up considerable experience in the field.
The infrastructure it operates is based around dual, mirrored IBM RS6000 S7A servers with 4-way SMP 64-bit processors with the potential to expand to 12-way multi-processing capability. Microgen has outsourced a wide area network with a high-speed ATM backbone enabling Framestream customer connections to British Telecommunications Plc.
