Nominet considering redundancies

[martin-s]

Charitable donations aside, I thought the business was still a cash cow. Does anyone have any data on this?

 

[ukbackorder]

Maybe they've spent too much on hiring lots of people who don't do anything productive......or maybe they've just been hiring people for the wrong reasons. I'm sure it will not be their fault. On the other hand with Bradley finally leaving they should have a lot more money. Unless of course they decide to give it to other companies with close ties to board members or fund some 'book deals'.

 

[Helmuts]

Humm.. The business should be good + Nominet has secured the gov.uk contract (as far as I have heard).

Probably reorganization, as many effective companies practice this.

Maybe @Steve Wright can share some light?

 

[Helmuts]

Bang.. Kevin from DomainIncite just published: https://domainincite.com/29629-up-to-70-jobs-on-the-line-at-nominet-as-uk-regs-dwindle

 

[Edwin]

The damage was done when they introduced .uk and jacked registration and renewal prices up so much. They had a great little business and ruined it by getting greedy. Now like all organisations that overextend themselves, the bill's come due.

 

[Helmuts]

The damage was done when they introduced .uk and jacked registration and renewal prices up so much. They had a great little business and ruined it by getting greedy. Now like all organisations that overextend themselves, the bill's come due.

I understand that there are around 300 employees at Nominet. .. if they have lost a very large client > probably lots of people were hired for supporting just that project.
.. my assumptions.. there are many Nominet members here who know the situation as it is.

.. could this be us making a fuss out of nothing extraordinary? .. business as usual.

great day all! H

 

[doma1n]

The damage was done when they introduced .uk and jacked registration and renewal prices up so much. They had a great little business and ruined it by getting greedy. Now like all organisations that overextend themselves, the bill's come due.

That’s a great synopsis of what’s happened Edwin.

 

[Edwin]

I remember now why I gave up on all things Nominet after years of campaigning hard. Nothing to gain, only arguments.

 

[jasman]

But surely the additional revenue they are getting from all the .uk reg fees (probably most of which is from .co.uk owners pressurised into pay to stop others grabbing the .uk version) provides a substantial albeit undeserved chunk of revenue for Nominet, with little additional manpower needed to generate it? If anything I would have thought .uk is one of the few Nominet schemes in the last 2 decades that has had a net contribution to Nominet's financial position.

 

[Whois-Search]

Things are far from “business as usual” at Nominet…

Nominet have lost the Protective Domain Name Service (PDNS) contract with the Government here worth £30.5 million. Which will lose the company about £6-8 million a year over next five years. That will put the whole Nominet cyber diversification strategy in jeopardy, when you consider the cyber unit made a £2.4 million loss last financial year - see FY23 accounts page 9.

Losing PDNS comes after selling off Cyglass in the States for $1 pre-pack administration, after buying it for $6 million with a huge burn rate per month. Millions upon millions of pounds have been wasted on this cyber strategy over the last decade.

Also after three years of trying to “fix” the situation (post EGM) the current board seems to have decided to cut its losses. Which involves combining Registry + Cyber in to one business unit and making 70 people redundant.

No doubt the .uk infrastructure has also been neglected while this decade distraction happened (hence hiring a CTO) and now we will all (registrants) have to pay for a new registry platform from 2025. Due to no growth and flatlining registry statistics.

As for the good news of the NHS contract and the .gov.uk contract mentioned above…

The NHS contract seems to have gone to a company in the US called insight.com - how much of the £15 million is Nominet getting?

The .gov.uk contract which replaces JISC and Centralnic’s software is only worth about £1.3 million over 5 years. Very odd that contract goes out to tender when Centralnic only got hold of it three years ago. Some might even say Nominet are doing it at cost?

Perhaps Nominet should be more transparent on this train wreck rather than send carefully worded emails to members only.

 

[JimDavies]

Things are far from “business as usual” at Nominet…


Losing PDNS comes after selling off Cyglass in States for $1 pre-pack, after buying it for $6 million with a huge burn rate per month. Millions upon millions of pounds have been wasted on this cyber strategy over the last decade.

To be clear, they gave CyGlass to the existing management team for a dollar.

About a year later CyGlass was bought by Watchguard. For more than a dollar.

https://www.watchguard.com/wgrd-news/press-releases/new-acquisition-powers-ai-based-ndr-and-open-xdr

 

[lazarus]

Nominet should open their eyes as to the reasons behind the decline in the number of domains it manages.

If prices go up, domain sales go down.
If domain sales go down, .UK becomes less popular.
If .UK is less popular, domain sales go down.
If sales go down. Nominet increases the price.
Repeat...

Increasing the price, can only accelerate the decline.

It's disastrous for any business if the price is high and the demand is low.
Once you have priced yourselves out of a market, it is extremely hard to recover.


It's sad. As it doesn't have to be this way...

What are the incentives? Where is the marketing? Where are the Registrar Promotions?

I'm all for streamlining the business to make it run more efficiently.
But not for cutting off the hand that feeds it.

 

[aZooZa]

Bring back Jay Daley.