Attenda strengthens SaaS partnership with BIW

Application managed services provider Attenda has renewed its partnership agreement with SaaS provider to the construction sector BIW in a five year deal announced this morning. Attenda has been BIW's managed services partner since 2000 and essentially acts as BIW's infrastructure partner enabling its applications to be delivered over the web on a global basis.

First thoughts

As regular readers will know, we don't usually comment on these kinds of announcements but this one gives us an opportunity to highlight two particularly interesting private UK companies. We met with the management team of Attenda recently and will be publishing a review if the company shortly but, in summary, we feel that Attenda's application managed services offering places it right at the heart of the cloud computing revolution. Arguably Attenda's most exciting growth area is the 15% of its revenue generated as the managed services partner to SaaS providers either in the form of pure play vendors such as BIW or established applications vendors looking to provide their products on a SaaS basis such as Simplex. Attenda has grown its revenues consistently since it was founded in 1997 (even throughout the post dotcom bust) and is expected to growth revenues by 20% in 2009 to over £25m. The company broke through into profitability in 2006 and, with a relatively fixed cost base, margins are now increasingly rapidly.

With revenues of around £6m, BIW is one of the UK's leading pure play SaaS vendors. Whilst it seems possible that the construction downturn may check BIW's growth in the short term, in our view, it represents a great example of the new wave of software vendors that have the potential to have a real impact on the dominance of established vendors over the medium to long term.