Edinburgh-based Hutchinson Networks has been put into administration.
Paul Hutchinson (pictured) started the company in 2011 after “breaking away from the Cisco learning partner’s space”, where he had been for “probably 15 years’’ and was working towards becoming a Cisco Gold partner and worked with Riverbed, F5 Networks, VMware and Velocloud.
The move is a shock. Last year Hutchinson’s technology business was growing so fast that he needed additional capital to continue to drive that growth. In April Edinburgh-based Hutchinson Networks announced £2.2 million of equity backing to allow the business to keep pace with the opportunities it saw. Hutchinson said in November that over the last two years they made revenues of £5 million, then £9.5 million and “we’re hoping to finish this year on £12 million. So that’s late 30s percent year on year growth”.
Administrator KPMG confirmed today that 94 of the firm’s 109 staff have been made redundant. The administrators said the 15 employees who had been retained would help them to continue the network operation centre and provide multi-cloud platform services to customers, whilst a sale of the business and assets was explored.
Joint administrator Blair Nimmo, from KPMG, said: “Hutchinson Networks was a rising star in global IT network deployment. It had invested heavily for future growth and secured attractive contracts for the second half of 2019. Despite the exhaustive actions of the directors to increase sales, reduce costs and attract new investment, the business was unable to continue trading. We are exploring a sale of the business and assets and would encourage any interested parties to contact us as soon as possible.”
Some of the staff might end up being hired by other Cisco partners in the area who have also pounced on Hutchinson’s customers.
According to the BBC, the rival Cinos is about to take on eight former Hutchinson employees.
