Either way, its most recent push into the world of managed web services – or cloud computing, as it has become known – may end up being its most astute move yet.

All too often in the fast-paced world of high technology, companies are considered successful simply because they have survived when most of their competitors have failed.

Glasgow-based Iomart has changed its identity over the years more often than a triple agent in a Robert Ludlum spy novel, but at least it now has a healthy set of financial results to shout about.

The Alternative Investment Market-listed company, which in the past has struggled to reach profitability, yesterday posted a pre-tax profit of £517,000 for the half-year to the end of September, compared with a £708,000 pre-tax loss during the same period last year.

Angus MacSween, Iomart’s chief executive and co-founder, also enthused yesterday that the company had “achieved a major milestone during the period moving into recurring monthly Ebitda (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) profitability in our existing operations”.

Iomart, which earlier this year described its 2008-09 losses as “planned losses”, at the same time posted a 47% surge in revenues to £8.4 million, compared with £5.7m last time.

To be fair, the technology landscape has morphed dramatically in the past decade and, whether by luck, design or both, Iomart, a dot.com-era survivor founded by MacSween and Bill Dobbie back in 1998, has evolved with the times.

The company began life as a small telecom and internet service provider. It went through tough times in 2001 when the crash-and-burn dot.com bubble burst, but eventually sold off its Madasafish ISP business

for £3m, along with its loss-making broadband business.

It later transformed itself into an internet software operation before changing again into its latest incarnation – a data centre and web-site hosting and managed services company, also known as “cloud services”.

While no-one can predict the future of technological evolution, Iomart’s push into the cloud is in keeping with the very latest in trends and it has found itself in illustrious – not to mention competitive – company.

Microsoft has also prospered in the cloud and recently revealed that it has so far attracted more than a million paying customers, including fast-food giant McDonald’s and major insurer Aviva.

Merrill Lynch, now part of Bank of America, last year estimated the cloud computing market will be worth $160bn (£96.5bn) by 2011.

Iomart now distinguishes itself from existing data centres, which offer space to servers in secure locations, by reserving the vast bulk of its space for the lucrative customers of its managed web services.

The company, which employs 150 people at sites throughout the UK, counts Stagecoach, BSkyB, BT and Strathclyde Police among its customer base, but also caters to the SME market.

Iomart claims to hold a unique place in the hosting market because it said it “genuinely offers a one source approach”, in that it physically owns and manages its own network infrastructure, including “state-of-the-art data centre facilities”, and offers “world-beating levels of service to its customers”.

MacSween said: “The enhancement of our cloud computing offerings during the period underlines our intentions to innovate in the provision of UK hosting services and we believe we are well placed to take advantage of the market opportunity in this area.”

Last July, the company raised £20m from the sale of its online business directory service Ufindus to BT.

As part of its evolution, Iomart acquired the dedicated server hosting company RapidSwitch for £5.25m in May, which operates a sophisticated data centre in Berkshire where it manages systems for thousands of clients.

The purchase, which provided Iomart with a fifth data centre, was completely in line with its strategy of trying to accelerate its growth in the market for hosted services – which is itself a growth market as the recession has encouraged firms to outsource in the hope of cutting costs while boosting the efficiency of their operations.

Iomart said the customer base of its hosting business had more than doubled over the past 12 months.

In September, the company also signed a deal with agency Cimex, which provides digital services for the public sector to provide disaster recovery solutions for a government client before developing solutions for its other customers.

MacSween yesterday added: “We have continued to win new business since the end of the period and have good visibility of revenues for the second half of the year.”

Shares in Iomart yesterday climbed 1.1% to 45.5p.