Inabox has unveiled a new cloud service built on the infrastructure from its Hostworks acquisition that it hopes will drive higher margins this financial year.
The new product, dubbed Cloudinabox, allows SME customers to transition IT infrastructure and applications to the cloud. The product was developed in-house using the existing cloud capabilities from Hostworks, which Inabox bought in early 2017.
The company said Cloudinabox would be marketed towards its direct and indirect Telcoinabox customers. The service is currently in beta testing and is expected to launch in the second half of the 2018 financial year.
The product announcement came during Inabox's half-year results presentation for the six months ending 31 December 2017. Revenue for the half-year was up 23.6 percent to $52.9 million, while underlying earnings dipped 5.2 percent to $2.4 million.
Net profit fell from a $500,000 profit in the first half of FY17 to a $1.6 million loss. Inabox said the results were disappointing but in line with expectations following the 2017 Hostworks acquisition.
Inabox told shareholders in November that Hostworks would have a severe negative impact on revenue, after a small number of enterprise customers rationalised their services, and another three enterprise customers moved their services away. Inabox now expects Hostworks to contribute to earnings in FY19.
The company announced a number of cost saving initiatives at the time, including cutting 10 percent of its staff headcount. Inabox said these cost initiatives had largely been completed, and were expecting to save $2 million in annualised costs.
Inabox has also impaired the entire $1.1 million of intangible assets from Hostworks customer contracts and relationships to avoid further write-downs.
On the bright side, Inabox signed a major deal with Telstra in December to provide white-labelled enablement services to its wholesale customers for three years, which includes back-office operational and technical support services, generating development fees and recurring SaaS revenues, which Inabox said was already contributing revenue.
Inabox also signed up three new retail services providers, which migrate their services later this financial year. Inabox expects these new customers to add an additional $4 million in annual revenue, which will largely replace the lost revenue from when the company terminated some of its unprofitable reseller agreements last year.
Looking ahead, Inabox said it expected to cross the $100 million revenue milestone this financial year.
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
