A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(May 2019) |
Company type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | |
Founded | 2008 Slough, Berkshire |
Founders | |
Headquarters | Birmingham , |
Area served | United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, India, Australia, Canada and United States |
Key people | Simon Walsh (CEO) |
Revenue |
|
| |
Owner |
|
Number of employees |
|
Website | oneadvanced |
Advanced Computer Software Group Ltd. (operating as OneAdvanced) is a British private company founded by Vin Murria in 2008. The company has its headquarters in Birmingham, West Midlands and provides information technology services including hosting and cloud based systems to the NHS and many other organisations. Through various acquisitions, in 2016 it became the third largest software provider in the UK market while employing over 2,400 people with a customer base of more than 20,000 organisations.
The company was founded by Vin Murria in 2008. Originally listed on the Alternative Investment Market in 2008 with a cash value of £3 million, it was bought by Vista Equity Partners in 2014 for £765 million. From the 18% stake Murria held in she took £140.2m from the sale making her one of the wealthiest women in the UK. [1] Murria was awarded an OBE for services to the UK digital economy and advancing women in the software sector in the 2018 New Year Honours. [2]
At the time of sale, Vista brought in a new leadership team including Chief Executive Officer Gordon Wilson, and Chief Financial Officer Andrew Hicks.
In August 2019, Vista sold a 50% stake to BC Partners for £2 billion including debt. [3]
In 2023, the company undertook a strategy refresh, alongside changes to the executive management team, appointing Simon Walsh as Chief Executive Officer, Stephen Dews as Chief Financial Officer and Andrew Henderson as Chief Technology Officer. The aim of the strategy refresh was stated to prioritise resources into high growth market sectors and product categories. [4] Part of this refresh included updating the operating name from "Advanced" to "OneAdvanced".
In August 2022, the company experienced a cybersecurity incident caused by LockBit 3.0 ransomware. [5] Adastra, Caresys, Odyssey, Carenotes, Crosscare, Staffplan and eFinancials products were all affected, with downtime and recovery lasting for several months.
Perpetrators of the attack were able to extract information relating to 16 Staffplan and Caresys customers. [6] 82,946 people were affected by the breach which included phone numbers and medical records, as well as details of how to gain entry to the homes of 890 people who were receiving care at home. [7]
The cyber attack including resulting remediation and outage credits cost the group £18.2 million in 2023 with a further £2.7 million provisioned for additional expenditure in future years. [4]
The Information Commissioner's Office announced in August 2024 a provisional decision to impose a fine of £6.09m on the company, following an initial finding that the provider failed to implement measures to protect the personal information. [7]
In January 2024, IBM announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire application modernization capabilities from Advanced. The transaction was expected to close in the second quarter of 2024. The team are to join the IBM Consulting division with service offerings aiming to complement the capabilities of IBM Watsonx Code Assistant for Z. [8]
Advanced's head office is located in Mailbox, Birmingham with other office locations in Newcastle, Ashford, Belfast, Dublin, York and Willerby.
The US head office is located in Atlanta, Georgia, while the Australian office is located in Melbourne. Advanced also have offices in India; specifically Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Baroda, where the primary development functions are located.
Acquisition | Date | Price | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
Serco Learning | December 2012 | £7.25m | A deal for Serco's education unit, bringing software including Facility CMIS Administration with Facility ePortal and Progresso for primary and secondary schools, timetabling software Scheduler, and CMIS and CMIS Go for the higher education sector. |
Computer Software Holdings | March 2013 | £110m | Paid for partly by the share placing that helped raise £44m for ACS. [9] |
Compass | February 2014 | £14.5m | Advanced extended its reach in the education software market by purchasing Chester-based CRM specialist Compass Computer Consultants. [10] Compass was later renamed "ProSuite". |
ConsultCRM [11] | April 2014 | ||
Hudman [12] | July 2017 | A Welsh cloud SaaS solution, Hudman was later renamed "Business Cloud Essentials". | |
Information Balance | March 2018 | £2.5m | |
Science Warehouse | March 2018 | £17m | A British developer of cloud SaaS procurement solutions for £17 million. [13] Science Warehouse was later renamed "Cloud Marketplace" |
Docman | July 2018 | £90m | Advanced acquired PCTI Solutions. [14] Their product, Docman, maintains one billion records and documents for more than 40,000,000 patients in the UK, including the whole of Scotland. [15] A problem with version 7 of the Docman platform in September 2018 meant letters received through NHSmail, automatically scanned to be added to patient records, were not uploaded. About 6,000 GP practices using the electronic document transfer function were affected. [16] |
Oyez | March 2019 | £23.2m | |
Kirona | April 2019 | £55.1m | Acquired from Livingbridge and Gresham House. |
Modern Systems | July 2019 | $26m | |
Careworks | November 2019 | €21.5m | |
Tikit | March 2020 | £46.8m | Acquired for significantly less than the original £80 million asking price. [17] |
Mitrefinch | October 2020 | £90.6m | Acquired from LDC who completed a management buyout in 2016 for £20 million. [18] |
Clear Review | October 2020 | £26m | Acquired from Stuart Hearn (entrepreneur and former Sony Music HR Director) and Mercia Asset Management [19] |
Certainty | February 2021 | £16.3m | |
bksb | May 2021 | £19.3m | Acquired from West Nottinghamshire College. |
Smart Apprentices | May 2021 | £28m | Acquired from entrepreneur Fiona Hudson-Kelly. [20] |
Isosec | September 2021 | £22.3m | A previous acquisition attempt from rival firm Imprivata was abandoned in May 2021 after a CMA investigation. [21] |
cloudtrade | October 2021 | £25.8m | |
Portt | April 2022 | £16.05m | |
Decision Time | April 2022 | £22m | |
Pellcomp | June 2022 | £8.1m |
Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide.
Blackbaud, Inc. is a cloud computing provider that supports nonprofits, foundations, corporations, education institutions, healthcare organizations, religious organizations, and individual change agents. Its products focus on fundraising, website management, CRM, analytics, financial management, ticketing, and education administration.
Sopra Steria is a European-based consulting, digital services, and software development company with 50,000 consultants. The company is headquartered in Paris and has operations in several countries in Western Europe.
Finastra is a financial software company headquartered in London, England. The company sells to the retail banking, transaction banking, lending, and treasury capital markets. Finastra was formed in 2017 by the combination of London-based Misys, a provider of financial operations software, and global payments and lending technology provider D+H. At the time of its formation, Finastra was considered the third-largest financial services technology company in the world.
Palantir Technologies Inc. is a public American company that specializes in software platforms for big data analytics. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, it was founded by Peter Thiel, Stephen Cohen, Joe Lonsdale, and Alex Karp in 2003. The company's name is derived from The Lord of the Rings where the magical palantíri were "seeing-stones," described as indestructible balls of crystal used for communication and to see events in other parts of the world.
111 is a free-to-call single non-emergency number medical helpline operating in England, Scotland and Wales. The 111 phone service has replaced the various non-geographic 0845 rate numbers and is part of each country's National Health Service: in England the service is known as NHS 111; in Scotland, NHS 24; and in Wales, NHS111 Wales.
Mediaocean is an advertising services and software company, headquartered in New York City.
UKG is an American multinational technology company with dual headquarters in Lowell, Massachusetts, and Weston, Florida. It provides workforce management and human resource management services.
Mandiant, Inc. is an American cybersecurity firm and a subsidiary of Google. Mandiant received attention in February 2013 when it released a report directly implicating China in cyber espionage. In December 2013, Mandiant was acquired by FireEye for $1 billion, who eventually sold the FireEye product line, name, and its employees to Symphony Technology Group for $1.2 billion in June 2021.
International Business Machines Corporation, nicknamed Big Blue, is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York and present in over 175 countries. IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities across a dozen countries, having held the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business for 29 consecutive years from 1993 to 2021.
Rocket Software is a privately held software development firm founded in 1990. Using the IBM Z, IBM Power, and embedded database platforms, Rocket provides predictive analytics with deep data, develops AI and machine learning capabilities, and designs mobile and browser applications. Its software runs on multiple platforms and operating systems, including mainframe, IBM z/OS, IBM i, UNIX, Windows and other platforms and offers tools to access non-SQL data with standard SQL queries. Rocket operates in markets including the financial, banking, health care, government, insurance, aerospace, auto manufacturing, and retail industries.
Cyren Inc. was a cloud-based Internet security technology company that provided security services and threat intelligence services to businesses. It offered a range of services including web security, DNS security, anti-spam solutions, phishing detection, ransomware protection, URL filtering, malware detection, and botnet attack prevention. Cyren also provided endpoint protection for mobile devices and Internet of Things (IoT) gateways. Major clients included Microsoft, Google, Check Point, Dell, T-Mobile, and Intel. The company announced its closure in February 2023.
Cohesity is an American privately held information technology company headquartered in San Jose, California with offices in India and Ireland. The company develops software that allows IT professionals to backup, manage and gain insights from their data across multiple systems or cloud providers. Their products also include anti-ransomware features, Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service, and SaaS management.
The WannaCry ransomware attack was a worldwide cyberattack in May 2017 by the WannaCry ransomware cryptoworm, which targeted computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system by encrypting data and demanding ransom payments in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. It was propagated using EternalBlue, an exploit developed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for Windows systems. EternalBlue was stolen and leaked by a group called The Shadow Brokers a month prior to the attack. While Microsoft had released patches previously to close the exploit, much of WannaCry's spread was from organizations that had not applied these, or were using older Windows systems that were past their end of life. These patches were imperative to cyber security, but many organizations did not apply them, citing a need for 24/7 operation, the risk of formerly working applications breaking because of the changes, lack of personnel or time to install them, or other reasons.
EternalBlue is a computer exploit software developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). It is based on a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows that allowed users to gain access to any number of computers connected to a network. The NSA knew about this vulnerability but did not disclose it to Microsoft for several years, since they planned to use it as a defense mechanism against cyber attacks. In 2017, the NSA discovered that the software was stolen by a group of hackers known as the Shadow Brokers. Microsoft was informed of this and released security updates in March 2017 patching the vulnerability. While this was happening, the hacker group attempted to auction off the software, but did not succeed in finding a buyer. EternalBlue was then publicly released on April 14, 2017.
Petya is a family of encrypting malware that was first discovered in 2016. The malware targets Microsoft Windows–based systems, infecting the master boot record to execute a payload that encrypts a hard drive's file system table and prevents Windows from booting. It subsequently demands that the user make a payment in Bitcoin in order to regain access to the system.
Vinodka "Vin" Murria is a British businesswoman and founder of Advanced Computer Software where she was CEO until it was acquired in 2015. Prior to that she was founder and CEO of Computer Software Group Plc, acquired by Hellman&Friedman in 2007. She works as an investor/advisor to HgCapital.
Cisco Talos, or Cisco Talos Intelligence Group, is a cybersecurity technology and information security company based in Fulton, Maryland. It is a part of Cisco Systems Inc. Talos' threat intelligence powers Cisco Secure products and services, including malware detection and prevention systems. Talos provides Cisco customers and internet users with customizable defensive technologies and techniques through several of their own open-source products, including the Snort intrusion prevention system and ClamAV anti-virus engine.
Fortra is an American cybersecurity company based in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. The company was founded as Help/38 in 1982, rebranded as HelpSystems in 1988, and became Fortra in 2022. Fortra is owned by private equity firms TA Associates, Harvest Partners, Charlesbank Capital Partners, and HGGC.