Iomart has right recipe for maker of Masterchef

IOMART, the Glasgow-based IT group, has won a string of contracts totalling more than £2.5 million, including a deal with the maker of television series Masterchef and Merlin.

Shine TV - which also makes Got To Dance for Sky - chose the group's hosting business to manage its website.

Travel agency Flight Centre - which has 93 stores in the UK, including eight north of the Border - has also outsourced the management of its internet offering to the company.

Software distributor Softcat is using Iomart for more complex website hosting services.

The Scottish firm said that seven of its recent deals had each been worth more than 100,000 and that it was winning up to 40 contracts a month from both new and existing clients.

Angus MacSween, Iomart's chief executive, argued that the recent spate of contract wins showed that more companies were looking to take advantage of "cloud computing".

In cloud computing, users access software and data via the internet instead of having programmes installed on computers within their own office.

"We are witnessing an accelerated adoption of cloud computing and cloud services among enterprises and the size and scale of deployments is also growing," MacSween said.

"Businesses are thinking far more strategically about cloud services and the benefits that they will bring to their IT operations over the next few years."

MacSween believes his firm is well-placed to take advantage of the growth in the cloud market.

Iomart was launched in 1998 and floated on Aim in 2000. The firm now has five data centres - from which it can store information and host websites - throughout the UK.

The group is due to release its pre-close interim update at the end of the month.