A BURY St Edmunds-based IT services company with ambitious plans to expand has launched itself on the Ofex stock market. Sicon Ltd, based in Lamdin Road, has set its sights on raising the funds to allow it to grow throughout East Anglia and beyond.

A BURY St Edmunds-based IT services company with ambitious plans to expand has launched itself on the Ofex stock market.

Sicon Ltd, based in Lamdin Road, has set its sights on raising the funds to allow it to grow throughout East Anglia and beyond.

Its aim is gradually to create a national organisation which small businesses will feel confident about using, it says.

The firm, formerly known as Si Consultants and with a 39-strong workforce, has been helping small and medium-sized businesses with their IT needs for a number of years.

Sicon's managing director, Richard Youngman, said they had teamed up with some City professionals who had achieved similar things with other firms, and set up Hilton Head plc, which bought Sicon Ltd in February 2005.

Sicon's directors are major shareholders in Hilton, and they have been working on their expansion plans for the last three years. Ofex is an alternative, smaller scale market to the London stock market.

“At Sicon, our objective has always been to help small and medium-sized businesses obtain better IT services than were previously available on the market,” said Mr Youngman.

“We find it frustrating that so many small businesses spend large amounts of money on systems with little or no warranty, incorrectly or poorly configured and with insufficient support services to maintain them. With no regulation in the IT sector, it is impossible to police.

“We cannot say that we are perfect, but we do try very hard to provide an excellent level of service and support to our clients. This is proven by our client retention rate over the past years.”

They had achieved a lot of their growth over the lat few years through the acquisition of three competitor companies, enabling them to gain economies of scale and pool resources, he said.

“In order to expand our business even further, we needed a way of raising funding so that we could expand throughout East Anglia and into other regions in the country, gradually creating a national organisation that the small business could be confident of using and obtaining a reliable, quality service,” he said.

The company began trading on PLUS Markets (Ofex) in July.

Mr Youngman said Hilton was using a “buy and build” strategy to create and develop a consultancy-based national brand. The first phase of the plan involves acquiring established and profitable operations in nine regions in the UK, which will function as operational “hubs” of the business.

The firm was also planning to involve itself in additional services, such as specialist training and radio frequency identification technology to broaden its client base, he said.