The least glamorous software in Britain may also be the most consequential. A taxi licence, a planning objection, a food-hygiene inspection and the local search holding up a house sale all pass through systems that most citizens never see. Arcus Global has spent 16 years turning those municipal chores into cloud applications. Its pitch is elegantly blunt: take the public sector off ageing, isolated programs and put the work on one configurable platform.
The Cambridge company sells more than 50 products and services grouped into four broad families: Regulatory Services, Built Environment, a Digital Platform and Professional Services. The catalogue runs from planning and building control to pollution, pest control, trading standards, waste, citizen accounts and online forms. Salesforce Service Cloud supplies the general machinery underneath. Arcus supplies the local-government grammar - addresses, cases, inspections, statutory clocks, public registers and the many permissions required when a record concerns somebody's home or livelihood.
That distinction matters. A council does not merely need customer relationship management with a government skin. It needs a planning officer to see the correct parcel of land, an inspector to update a case from the field, a resident to submit evidence from a phone and an auditor to reconstruct who changed what. Arcus makes money from recurring licences and support, then charges for implementation, configuration, integration and professional services. It is software as a service with a substantial helping of institutional archaeology.
01 / OriginThe revolution BT and HP declined to see
Arcus began with a disagreement. While studying for MBAs at Cambridge Judge Business School, Denis Kaminskiy and Lars Malmqvist researched cloud computing for BT and Hewlett-Packard. They argued that remote, elastic computing represented a technology revolution. The big companies were unconvinced. Kaminskiy and Malmqvist decided to build the idea themselves after graduating in 2009.
Their first sales infrastructure was reportedly an old BMW. They drove around England explaining cloud computing to government departments, then squeezed into a 100-square-foot Cambridge office with two desks. The timing was awkward and useful. The financial crisis had hollowed out the usual graduate options, while austerity would soon force public organisations to pursue cheaper ways of doing the same statutory work.
“We replace that software, which is often 20 years old, with a modern cloud platform.”Denis Kaminskiy, describing the model in 2015
By 2014, Arcus said turnover had passed £2 million and its broader cloud business had served more than 70 public-sector clients. Four years later, revenue for the year ended June 2018 reached £13 million, up 34 percent. External capital followed: £3 million from YFM Equity Partners in May 2018 and another £2.5 million in 2019, on top of earlier growth funding associated with BOOST&Co. The extra money was intended to expand the local-government platform and products such as Arcus Answer, a voice-automation tool later used in NHS settings.
02 / ProductOne platform, several dozen peculiar jobs
The competitive idea is not to outbuild Salesforce. It is to borrow Salesforce's security, audit, workflow and reporting foundations, then spend Arcus's effort on work that generic enterprise software handles badly. The local-government CRM adds citizen and address views, service catalogues and integration with a self-service hub. Built Environment covers planning, building control and land charges. Regulatory Services handles everything from taxi licensing and food hygiene to anti-social behaviour and private water supplies.
security + workflow + records
government rules + integrations
planning + licensing + citizens
For buyers, the attraction is consolidation. A common person, business or property record can move across departments; online forms can feed the same casework system used by officers; staff can work remotely; and managers can compare services without first reconciling a small archipelago of databases. For Arcus, every successful module makes the next sale easier. A council buying planning software can later add licensing or CRM without commissioning an entirely fresh platform.
Procurement is part of the product strategy. Arcus has appeared on successive Crown Commercial Service G-Cloud frameworks, which let public bodies buy approved cloud services without inventing a procurement route from scratch. In 2015 it listed 91 services across all four lots of G-Cloud 7. That access, coupled with specialist staff who have worked inside government, gives a Cambridge supplier a plausible route into competitions against larger incumbents such as Civica, NEC Software Solutions and Idox.
03 / EconomicsDigital transformation, with the price tags left on
Public procurement notices strip away the fog around enterprise software. A two-year email-relay service for the Department of Health and Social Care was worth £37,500. Active Travel England's planning licences and implementation contract carried a value of £494,245 through its optional extension. Chesterfield's two years of implementation, support and Arcus and Salesforce licences were awarded at £503,308. Manchester's five-year neighbourhood-services case-management contract was estimated at £1.741 million.
Selected public contract values
These sums buy different combinations of software, users, migration, configuration and support, so the bars are not a price comparison. They do reveal the model's range. Arcus can sell a narrow utility, a departmental application or a multi-service platform. Recurring licences create the SaaS base; implementation and continuing support acknowledge that a statutory workflow cannot simply be switched on after lunch.
In 2020 the company made a clarifying choice. It sold Arcus Cloud Services, its AWS-focused managed-services subsidiary, to Timico. The division had offered consulting, hosting and managed infrastructure. Letting it go concentrated Arcus Global more tightly on proprietary GovTech applications. The strategy had shifted from helping government use the cloud in general to owning the software government runs there.
04 / Reality checkThe cloud is new. The records are not.
The first thing to fail visibly was not the platform thesis but migration readiness. A 2024 Haringey planning error allowed a 5G mast application to pass after a refusal missed its deadline; the council attributed the episode to an unexpected system behavior and later added safeguards. In 2026, reporting linked Arcus migrations at Havant and Bracknell Forest to incomplete or inconsistent records and backlogs in land-charge searches. At Bracknell, hundreds of searches were outstanding and the council and supplier apologised for significant data problems.
Havant's own review described data-integrity inconsistencies, reporting limitations and user-interface challenges. The Land Charges module was not performing as expected. What changed the response was the operational evidence: the quickest route back to stability was judged to be a full reconfiguration and data re-migration using the supplier's expertise. Arcus's explanation was equally revealing. Some source data, it said, can be 30 years old.
A modern interface can expose an old inconsistency faster. It cannot decide which 1997 address record was true.
This is the condition under which the model strains. One platform works when the incoming records are profiled, cleansed and reconciled; when frontline users rehearse real cases; when the old system remains available long enough to compare results; and when statutory deadlines have fallbacks. It does not work as promised when a council treats migration as an export-import chore, compresses testing to meet a hosting cutoff or assumes configuration can settle ambiguous policy.
Build specialist products on proven infrastructure. Spend invention on the domain, not commodity plumbing.
Sell through buying routes customers already use. Procurement design is part of distribution.
Rehearse migrations repeatedly and reconcile counts, documents, addresses, permissions and deadlines.
Maintain read access, rollback plans and operational workarounds until the new record is demonstrably complete.
05 / PositionA specialist in the unavoidably specific
Arcus now says it supports more than 65 public-sector customers, including Manchester, Wiltshire, Haringey, Salford, the Home Office and the Department for Transport. Its leadership page names Peter Dewsbury as chief executive and Kaminskiy as a director. The company has continued to win and launch Built Environment and Regulatory Services projects, while directing new resources toward automation and selective uses of artificial intelligence.
Its culture has the informality of a company that remembers the battered BMW: paid volunteering days, team half-marathons, bird-box building and an internal awards night called the Arcus Oscars. Yet the market demands sobriety. Planning, licensing and public protection are governed by law, not product fashion. Arcus's advantage is knowing the difference between a generic case and a statutory one. Its risk is that every customer arrives with its own history folded into the database.
That makes Arcus more interesting than a simple cloud-success story. The founders were right that public computing would move off local servers. The harder question is what happens when it does. Arcus has built a credible answer in reusable software, domain expertise and public procurement access. Its recent troubles add the necessary footnote: transformation is not complete when the application loads. It is complete when the planning search comes back accurate, the inspector trusts the record and the citizen never has to learn the vendor's name.