Outsourcery

» see outsourcery.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Outsourcery turned over 8.05 million pounds in 2015 and lost 6.22 million pounds doing it. That was the best year of the three it spent as a listed company. In 2013, the year it floated on AIM at 110 pence, it turned over 5.22 million and lost 9.12 million, which is a loss nearly twice the size of the business. Until the middle of 2015 it was losing more money than it took in.

The product was unglamorous and perfectly sensible. Piers Linney and Simon Newton founded the company in Manchester in 2007 to sell hosted Microsoft infrastructure to small and medium businesses in Britain, the kind of firm that wanted Exchange and a phone system without owning a server room. By the end it ran as four units, and the names tell you how narrow the slices were: O-Cloud for hosted Skype for Business and raw infrastructure, MT for multi-tenant application services such as Exchange and Lync, Core Platform for the infrastructure that held smaller clients' IT, and a Public Sector Network beside them.

Linney was the public face, partly because he had spent a short spell as an investor on Dragons' Den, which bought the company more press coverage than a mid-size Manchester hosting business would normally get. The coverage did not convert. Channel sales came in under plan year after year, and an attempt to hire a more effective sales leader collapsed when the incoming executive changed his mind about joining. Both co-chief executives worked for nothing at one stage while going back to shareholders for more cash as liquidity drained.

~ the case file ~

~ the five weeks ~

AIM suspended the shares on 3 June 2016 because the company could not produce audited results for the year ended 31 December 2015. By then the end had already been arranged. Vodafone had agreed in April to put in more money on condition that Outsourcery appoint a non-executive director with an insolvency background, and Vodafone, owed somewhere between six and eight million pounds according to The Register's sources, had effectively taken charge of deciding which of its own channel partners would inherit the customers.

The Statement of Affairs later filed at Companies House sets out the mechanics. Vodafone provided a final seven figures of bridge funding, and on 11 May EY began a five-week sale process. Forty-nine prospective buyers were identified, thirty-six were offered a non-disclosure agreement, twenty-three trade buyers and three private equity houses signed one, and twelve lodged non-binding bids on 31 May. Two trade bidders and one equity bidder survived the cut; the equity bidder dropped out. EY took GCI's offer because it was unconditional and the money was there, and because GCI was already a Vodafone gold partner, so nothing further had to be agreed with the company's largest creditor.

~ the day itself ~

On the morning of 15 June 2016 Outsourcery confirmed to the London Stock Exchange what The Register had reported the week before: agreement had been reached to sell substantially the entire business and assets of its trading subsidiary Outsourcery Hosting Ltd to GCI Network Solutions, and to complete the sale it would be necessary to appoint administrators, which the board had resolved to do from EY. The appointment followed on 16 June and the sale completed shortly after.

The price was 4 million pounds, of which 3.73 million was goodwill and about 270,000 pounds was equipment. Against that sat 17.7 million pounds of IPO cash already spent and 4 million pounds of secured Vodafone debt, with another million being asked for when the telco made the introduction to EY. Outsourcery Plc went into administration along with Outsourcery Group Ltd and two holding companies; Outsourcery US and Outsourcery Mobile did not, because they were dormant and their only assets were money owed between group companies. Shareholders had already been told to expect no or little return.

~ who lives at the address ~

outsourcery.co.uk still resolves. It sits behind a bot wall and, when you get past it, serves twenty-eight kilobytes of affiliate listings for cryptocurrency casinos that skip identity checks, pitched at the 2026 British market and last revised on 7 January 2026. Type the old support address today and the first thing offered to you is a deposit bonus.

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