Ignition Bermuda Ltd is one of those rare businesses to have benefited from the recession.

That’s the view of the company’s chief executive officer Graham Pearson, who said cost-cutting firms were increasingly seeing the benefits of outsourcing their IT needs.

In contrast to many businesses on the Island, Ignition has seen strong growth this year, having first acquired Fireminds and then last month it merged the consultants from The Omni Group into its team of 80-plus employees in four countries.

“The recession really helped us,” Mr Pearson said. “People don’t want to lay out the capital expenditure on servers and pay a couple of staff to service them.

“Before the recession, there was a lot more money around and people were more reluctant to think about outsourcing critical systems.”

Mr Pearson highlighted several external factors that have helped Ignition’s business to flourish. One is the more general acceptance of the “cloud”, which described internet-based resources that can allow software and data to be shared, and which Ignition’s clients can plug into to replace their own servers.

Another was the widespread economic malaise, which has persuaded companies to look more seriously at IT outsourcing to trim expenses. A third factor was the increasing availability of affordable bandwidth.

The result has been a prodigious growth in cloud computing. “I’ve been in IT for about 30 years but the past 18 months I’ve seen the most exciting and paradigm changes,” Mr Pearson said.

The 12-year-old company now has about 5,000 users in 32 countries. Having started out in Bermuda, it now also has operations in the US, Canada and the Cayman Islands. Some of its international growth has come about through the global expansion of clients in Bermuda’s international business sector.

“Bermuda is still key to us,” Mr Pearson said. “This is our head office and strategic decisions are made here. In terms of growth, our clients are expanding beyond Bermuda as they diversify, and we have been following them.

“Key for us is to find IT companies in targeted jurisdictions that will provide the level of support we need for our clients.”

When a Bermuda insurance company client, for example, opens a new office in Dublin or Zurich, they do not need to worry about setting up a costly IT network.

“All they need is an internet connection,” Mr Pearson said. “If they have that, we can get them on the cloud within two hours.”

Cloud computing was reliant on connectivity, he added, but this had improved markedly in quality and value for money over the past year and a half. As a result, cloud computing had become a much more attractive and practical option than it was a few years ago.

Key for Bermuda international companies considering using the cloud is the need to keep its data on the Island.

“The public cloud will never be the panacea for the offshore market,” Mr Pearson said. Ignition has a solution for companies who want to source desktop needs from the public cloud but want to ensure their data stays in Bermuda: a public-private cloud hybrid service. The private cloud solution keeps the data on servers here.

Ignition’s services also make disaster recovery a lot less expensive and complicated for its clients. The company has two disaster recovery failover sites in Halifax and Curacao.

“It’s very easy to show people a multitude of savings that could be made and advantages like disaster recovery,” Mr Pearson said.

So why do so many company companies continue to buy and maintain their own networks?

“For a lot of people, I think it’s more of an emotional decision than a financial one,” Mr Pearson said. “Can you let go of having your own system in house?”

For more information, go to the Ignition’s website at www.ignitionmsp.com