iomart

iomart was founded in 1998 as an integrated internet and telecommunications company by former Scottish Telecom senior executives Angus MacSween and Bill Dobbie.[4][5] In 1999 the company received its first revenue from the launch of its business service in conjunction with Richard Branson's Virginbiz.net.[4]

In 2000 iomart Group incorporated and floated on the London Stock Exchange's Alternative Investment Market AIM. Through its Madasafish brand iomart offered the first UK consumer broadband connection. It also launched Scottish consumer Internet Service Provider, Jings![6] In the same year iomart launched the UK's first outsourced large-scale email hosting platform, ThinkMail.[7]

In 2002 the Telco businesses were sold for £2 million to Centrica and in 2003 the group acquired Web Genie Internet Ltd[8] for £437 thousand.

In 2004 iomart bought web hosting brand easyspace for £12m as well as hosting and domain company Internetters for £250k. In 2005 it launched the UK business directory Ufindus and launches the Netintelligence Managed Services Platform.

2006 saw the launch of Netintelligence as the world's first security Software as a Service product.[9]

In 2007 the group bought its first four data centres across the UK.

In 2008 iomart sold Ufindus to BT for £20m.[10] The following year iomart acquired dedicated server hosting specialist RapidSwitch for £5.5m.

In 2011 iomart were awarded First UK Kitemark for Online Child Safety. The company also acquired Titan Internet for £4.2m, Switch Media for £1.25m, Global Gold for £1.2m, and EQSN for £2.5m.

In Autumn 2012 iomart Group made a multimillion-pound investment in creating its own resilient dedicated fibre network to connect its data centres. The group also went on to acquire Melbourne Server Hosting for £7m and launched Host Your Kit youth football campaign.

In 2013 the company made two more acquisitions, Redstation for £8m and Backup Technology for £23m.[11]

In 2014 the company expanded further with new data centre and infrastructure operations on the east and west coasts of the US[12] plus a £multi-million extension of their existing Maidenhead data centre. At the end of 2014 the company made an announcement that they had acquired rival cloud service provider ServerSpace to further expand the group.

In 2015 the company made two more acquisitions, the Cloud Consultany; SystemsUp for a deal worth around £13m and United Hosting in December, in a deal worth up to £11m. In 2015, iomart was also identified as responsible for 14% of all the spam originating in the UK.[13]

In 2017, iomart acquired cloud infrastructure provider DediServe in a €7.9M deal.[14]

In September 2018, iomart acquired Bytemark.[15]

In February 2020, iomart acquired the cloud division of ServerChoice Limited for an initial consideration of £2.1m with a further maximum consideration of £0.9m.[16]

In March 2020, iomart acquired Memset Limited for an initial consideration of £3.3m with a further maximum consideration of £0.9m.[16]

In 2010 iomart launched the "Racks 4 Acres. Powering the Cloud. Preserving the Clouds" campaign.[17] Working with environmental charity Rainforest Concern, the group sponsored an acre of Ecuadorian cloud rainforest to mitigate the additional megawatts of power that is consumed within their data centres. Following this, iomart launched the "#Savethecloud365" campaign with their partner Microsoft. iomart pledged to donate £3 to Rainforest Concern for every Office 365 licence they sold during 2015.[18] In addition, iomart is also giving tablets to forest rangers working for Rainforest Concern in the Cloud Forest in Ecuador.[18] "Host Your Kit" is a scheme for UK youth teams to have sports strips provided by iomart. In 2012, over 500 youth football teams entered the competition.[19]

iomart offers cloud and managed hosting services, including colocation, connectivity, data protection, managed security, private cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, managed Azure, virtual desktop infrastructure, and professional services.