Think Systems UK Ltd

Think Systems UK Ltd is not valuable because it looks like a scaled access network. Its importance lies in a more fragile, more local asset: the stored knowledge of how small businesses in Kent actually run their phones, cloud accounts, backups, Wi-Fi, domains, support tickets and connectivity.

For twenty years a small firm in Canterbury sold Britain's mid-sized businesses an alternative to the cloud: a physical server, a named engineer, a phone that a human answered at three in the morning. The proposition never stopped selling. The company selling it still went under, owing the tax authority £296,976, and its entire physical estate changed hands for £13,750 — less than one of its customers might spend on hosting in a year. What happened to Think Systems UK Ltd is not a story about demand. It is a story about where the value in a micro-host actually lives, and the public record documents it with unusual completeness: the servers, the brand and the customers all outlived the company that owned them.