Beveridge raises his stake in cloud computing firm Iomart

By PETER RANSCOMBE
Published on 19/12/2012 00:00

FORMER Scottish Enterprise chief executive Crawford Beveridge has more than doubled his stake in Iomart, the Glasgow-based IT company he joined last year as a non-executive director.

Beveridge, who spent 16 years at computing giant Sun Microsystems, bought 18,000 shares at 195p each, splashing out more than £35,000 to take his stake to 30,000 shares.

Beveridge, who chairs Iomart’s remuneration committee, was paid £12,500 for sitting on the board between October 2011 and March this year, according to Iomart’s annual report.

As well as his work at Iomart, Beveridge is chairman of Scottish Equity Partners’ investment advisory board and Nasdaq-listed software firm Autodesk.

Chief executive Angus MacSween founded Iomart – which takes its name from the Gaelic word “iomairt”, meaning “enterprise” – in 1998 as an integrated internet and telecoms outfit. The company floated on the Alternative Investment Market (Aim) in 2000 and has gone on to become one of Europe’s largest “cloud computing” businesses, serving more than 300,000 customers each day.

Instead of keeping programs and files on a stand-alone desktop computer, cloud computing allows users to access data remotely over the internet.

Iomart owns its own data centres – vast sites housing computer servers to store websites and other information for clients – rather than renting other companies’ equipment, helping it to boost its profits.

Shares in Iomart have risen by more than 50 per cent in the past year, with the firm revealing in September that its profits will exceed City expectations for the current financial year.

House broker Peel Hunt said on Friday that the City did not yet fully appreciate Iomart’s growth prospects.