Citadel Group smashes $100 million milestone thanks to record contract wins

The Citadel Group has cracked the $100 million revenue milestone thanks to a record number of contract wins across its key verticals.

The Canberra-headquartered managed service provider generated $108.5 million in revenue for 2018 financial year ending 30 June, up 9.8 percent. EBITDA was also up 13 percent thanks to a focus on scalable solutions that don't require significant incremental resources, while net profit was up 26 percent to $19.4 million.

Chief executive Darren Stanley praised the progress of the company's Citadel Information Exchange, a cloud-based software solution for enterprise information management, after signing up 10 new clients to long-term contracts in the past 12 months and generating more than $68 million in new opportunities.

The company said it now supported more than 24,000 new Citadel-IX users thanks to new state government clients in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland.

"During the year we signed a record number of new contracts across the national security, government and defence vertical, while further increasing our growth pipeline," Stanley said.

"Investments made to develop secure cloud-based software solutions resulted in cross-selling opportunities and our increasing number of platforms have received significant interest from large government clients."

Overall, Citadel secured $74 million in new contract wins and extensions across its key verticals: defence and national security, government, health and tertiary education.

Growth was also underpinned by the trio of acquisitions Citadel has made in the past few years, including HPE partner Kapish in May 2016, e-health system supplier Charm in September 2017 and medical SaaS provider Anaesthetic Private Practice (APP) in April 2018.

The new wins include deploying Charm's oncology suite to 28 new sites, which was redeveloped into a new fully hosted, managed services solution, delivering a Veterinary Laboratory Information Management System for Adelaide University and supplying collaboration and digital transformation solutions to Melbourne City Council.

Looking ahead, Stanley said Citadel Group would double its R&D investment in business-critical software, big data/knowledge management and digital solutions. "We also plan to take advantage of M&A opportunities to further enhance our capabilities as attractive opportunities arise, to complement our organic growth strategy," Stanley said.