Gaia Technologies gone into Administration

[Brimstone]

Gaia Technologies have gone into Adminstration, if you any equipment or a contract from them you may have some forthcoming problems...

 

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/gaia-technologies-ict-school-supplier-administration/

Edited August 27, 2019 by elsiegee40

[DJ-1701]

Eep... never heard of them myself, but apparently a major player according to that article.

 

On their website they state:

 

Ben Woolrych and Anthony Collier, partners at specialist business advisory firm FRP Advisory LLP, were appointed as Joint Administrators of Gaia Technologies PLC (“the Company”) on 16th August 2019.

 

Gaia Technologies is based in Bangor, North Wales and is a leading provider of ICT technology, products and services to UK schools, colleges & universities.

[Ditto]

I wonder what the source of their cash-flow problems are. I wouldn't imagine schools are holding back payments.

[mikeprice]

I used to live quite close to their offices and they took over the IT support - and hence replaced all the computers in the school - at the school I worked at for many years

 

they seemed excellent at the time - but that was quite a few years ago and they seem to have expanded a lot since then

[Meldrew]

I wonder what the source of their cash-flow problems are. I wouldn't imagine schools are holding back payments.

 

The process, however is quite convoluted regarding new-builds, which is where I know them from:

- School orders Kit from Gaia.

- Kit arrives

- Gaia send invoice (inc VAT)

- School sends claim to DFE for invoice

- DFE eventually sends funds (ex-VAT)

- School claims VAT from government in next VAT return

- School receives VAT

- School pays Gaia

 

meanwhile many months have passed.

[ICTDirect_Dave]

A quick dig into their 2018 accounts shows that they weren't massively profitable but that they were turning a profit overall. Reading their forecasts they'd put plans in place for five years of growth.

 

I wonder what happened in the last 10 months.

[3s-gtech]

They had the LEA primary school support contract here. Not sure I ever heard a good word said, from the schools or ex-staff, but I had no personal experience of their service.

[Meldrew]

They had the LEA primary school support contract here. Not sure I ever heard a good word said, from the schools or ex-staff, but I had no personal experience of their service.

 

My experience of them wasn't great either.

[Stone1975]

If anyone knows of schools looking to get new kit let me know we can offer a wide range of grade A refurbished kit... or new kit on lease.

[willtech]

Seen this Today: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/23/gaia_tech_debt_sale/

 

Quiet a lot....

Edited October 24, 2019 by willtech

[mikeprice]

Hope it works out well for the schools they supported

 

Good luck to anyone involved

 

Including the school I worked at for many years (if they were still with Gaia)

[Primus]

We took over a school that was run by Gaia when their contract expired and they entered our MAT (recently).

 

The entire IP schema is based on 11.0.0.0/8 - and the windows domains are all .internal but were only made last year. The Hyper-V hosts and vSAN hosts are all on a different domain to the production domain - the whole setup is barking mad.

[mikeprice]

Possibly things have changed - when I was involved with them they were quite small - I think we were the first big school, at least outside their base in Bangor