RiverSoft making hard work of recovery

Network monitoring company RiverSoft has announced increased first quarter losses as phone companies continue to reduce spending on fault detection.

RiverSoft said losses for the quarter ended 31 March had increased to £9.4m from £8.35m for the same period last year. Sales sat at a mere £500,000 for the quarter.

Since the previous quarter, RiverSoft has made cost reductions of 20 per cent, or £1.8m, of which £500,000 came from redundancies.

RiverSoft's headcount went down from 203 members at the end of December to 167 at the end of April, contributing to one off charges of £3.3m during the quarter.

The company also worked to reduce property costs by getting out of a seven-year, £4.5m lease in San Francisco. Terminating the contract cost £1.9m - a charge also included in the one-off costs written down for the first quarter.

RiverSoft is working on enhancing its bottleneck-hunting software to improve its chances in the market with a software management tool for multi-protocol label switching (MPLS), among other initiatives.