EG Solutions plc (LON:EGS) has secured a US$1mln contract to supply its back office optimisation software to a “leading social networking corporation”.
The three-year deal, closed by eg’s partner Aspect Software Inc, will see the firm deploy up to 4,000 licences, with the potential for more to be sold in the future.
“This landmark contract win by Aspect, with one of the world's top ten technology disruptors, demonstrates the capability and contribution of our software across a wide range applications and sectors,” said eg’s chief executive Elizabeth Gooch.
“We are helping more of our customers to improve customer experience, workforce engagement, security and compliance.”
The Aspect/eg team was selected after impressing the client in a proof of concept project earlier in the year.
The win is Aspect’s third with the eg operational intelligence suite since March this year, after it previously closed two more contracts with a life and pensions provider and a health insurer in the US.
The deal provides further encouragement that the Aspect relationship is delivering, said broker N+1 Singer.
"Confirmation of a strong order book suggests more deals to come. We make no changes to our forecasts and stay at Buy with [the] stock trading on PE [price/earnings ratio] of 21.7x January 2017 and 16.8x 2018," it added.
House broker finnCap said the contract win helps to underpin the expected revenue growth. The broker is forecasting sales to rise to £9.5mln in the current financial year from £7.6mln last year, before advancing to £11.6mln the following year.
The deal also highlights new opportunities, in finnCap’s view.
“In this case, the operational intelligence software will be used to improve management of work and resources in the high-volume, rapidly changing and information‐sensitive, service request units of a major global technology disruptor. This is a new and innovative usage of eg’s solutions and reflects recent interesting requests and opportunities alongside its traditional market of service sector back office. This is opening up opportunities in areas like chat-bot routing and escalations, workforce optimisation, field service management and even document management,” the broker said.
The broker conceded that Aspect had struggled in the USA to sell eg’s back-office optimisation software to the 3,400 customers that use Aspect’s front-office software, though it has had more success in Asian markets.
Much was expected of the partnership with Aspect when it was forged in 2014 “but it has been a slow burn”, finnCap said, and looked like it might stop burning altogether when Aspect took protection from its creditors in March in order to restructure its debt.
“However, since it came out of that in May, Aspect seems much more focused and has brought in notable new business culminating in this large deal. There is a huge opportunity for eg's products in the US and this could represent a major turning point in the relationship,” suggested Lorne Daniel at finnCap.
Shares in eg Solutions rose to 49p this morning from 44p overnight, before ebbing to 45p, up 2.3% on the day.