Iomart chief executive Lucy Dimes has indicated that the company is set to ease back on acquisitions following its £57 million cash deal to take over Atech, a Microsoft MSP partner, which was announced last month.

While the Glasgow-based company won't rule out any further "really compelling" deals, particularly in the fields of security and managed services, Ms Dimes said Iomart will concentrate on taking advantage of the growth opportunities that Atech offers. Based in Marlow, Atech will add about £34m to Iomart's annual revenues and raises the group headcount from 400 to 650 members of staff.

"I think the focus of our activity is to consolidate what we have now bought with Atech and really leverage that in the marketplace," she said. "So you've kind of seen the big M&A from us for the moment."

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Ms Dimes added: "This acquisition is game-changing for us. It's a significant increase in revenue, a significant increase in scale and capability, and a shot in the arm for our culture."

Explaining the latter, she noted that recruitment and talent retention remain key challenges in the IT services sector.

"Atech have got a much lower staff attrition rate than ours - outs is about the industry norm - so we launched a programme called 'great place to work' focusing on staff retention," she said. "Attracting more talent will be key to our growth, as well as winning those new opportunities with customers."

Her comments came at AIM-quoted Iomart reported flat revenues of £62m for the six months to September 30 and a fall in pre-tax profits from £7.6m to £4.3m. Scott Cunningham, Iomart's chief financial officer, said this was in part due to the company's shift into higher-growth but lower-margin markets of cloud and security services.

"It will probably stabilise now in terms of the Atech acquisition that we did, which adds a lot of revenue and profit into the group going forward," Mr Cunningham said.

"It's roughly about the same profitability as Iomart today so that comes together quite nicely in terms of not having a significant impact on the quality of our margin."

The company is also targeting £1m of annualised cost savings by the end of this financial year which will come from a number of "efficiency" measures such as reducing energy consumption at its 12 UK data centres. 

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Asked whether there would be any impact on jobs, Mr Cunningham said: "Not really, no.

"The Atech acquisition is all about growth - we didn't look at it from a synergy point of view. It's all about growing the business so hopefully we will actually have to get some extra people to support that growth."

More than 90% of the company's turnover in the first half was generated from recurring revenue while the order book is at "record levels", up by 30% on the same period a year ago. Ms Dimes said the company is well-placed to build on this going forward.

"It's been a really busy first half for us," she said. "Obviously, trading was mixed because we are in the middle of this pivot to expose a greater part of the business to the growth markets of public, private and hybrid cloud services and security services, but we are pretty well-placed to finish that work in the second half and then enter the next year a much stronger and more credible business. 

"I think there will be more positive challenges going forward, dealing with a bulging pipeline and increasing demand from customers for migrations to the cloud and security services. One of the main reasons we bought Atech is increased scale and depth of capability in those two areas."

Shares in Iomart closed yesterday's trading 3p lower at 91p, a decline of about 3%.