Noledge Group eyes UK expansion with launch of third firm

Noledge Group, the IT services provider based in Dublin, is eyeing further expansion in Britain over the coming months as it prepares to launch its third trading company, Sruu.

The software sales group is in the midst of a major expansion plan, opening Sruu, which joins sister companies OSSM and Envisage, and planning to expand further into the UK market, where lucrative opportunities beckon.

The company provides software to customers, particularly in the retail space, that aims to improve the organisation and efficiency of stocking systems, invoices, and sales data and organise many other data points too.

“The average forecourt store in the retail context would carry between 3,000 and 8,000 line items which they are buying and selling every week. If you are buying and selling that many items a week, there’s a lot of paperwork,” said Ray Ryan, chief executive.

The group has been successful in moving 700 stores, primarily in Ireland, onto the Sage and Oracle software programmes, which they sell, but Ryan is eyeing up even larger retail opportunities across the Irish Sea, which are on a completely different scale.

“The population of stores in just the convenience store sector alone in the UK is 46,000 stores, so you can see where I’m going,” Ryan said, comparing the figure against 16,000 in Ireland.

“All of these forecourts and convenience stores are all actively purchasing stuff, selling stuff, administrating stuff,” Ryan said, and Noledge wants a bigger piece of the pie.

He is aiming for 10,000 of those stores to be using software provided by Noledge Group by 2027, a dramatic scaling up of the business considering they currently serve 700.

Ryan is also aiming to more than double the customer base to 2,000 stores in the next 12 months.

Ryan said that past funding the company received from Enterprise Ireland was instrumental in allowing the company to undertake research and development and gain a foothold in the UK market.

He is aiming for Sruu, the soon-to-be-launched company, to win a significant bulk of the new UK business, aiming for 70 per cent of the company’s revenue to come from there.

Sruu will develop its own software, unlike OSSM and Envisage, the other group firms, which sell and support software developed by others.

Ryan said that staff numbers at the company will continue to rise from where they stand today at 40 with the firm expecting about 10 more staff to join over the next year.

Sruu will be launched in the first quarter of this year, said Ryan, and the launch of that company, plus continued investment in supporting the existing software, will be the primary drivers of their increasing revenue over the next few years.

In terms of revenue, the main engine of the company at the moment, generating 60 per cent, are sales of the Sage software from Envisage Cloud Solutions.

“I would expect that by the end of year three, which would be 2027, that we would be a €10 million turnover business with about 60 to 70 people employed,” said Ryan.