In a positive trading update the firm says it had a good end to 2008, with contracted recurring revenue of £28.4 million for the year ending 31 December, up 40% from £20.27 million in 2007.

A cost cutting programme rolled out earlier this year, which included moving development work from in London and Paris to South Africa, has been a success, reducing costs by £1.5 million a year, says the vendor.

Statpro says, that with deal renewal rates of over 94% in 2008 and more than 70% of contracts by value committed beyond 2009, it is also "confident of delivering a solid performance in 2009".

The company says its rental business model providing a "significant level of resilience in difficult markets" with customers continuing to need its tools "irrespective of any impact they might be seeing relating to a changing economic environment".

Statpro predicts potential customers will move away from complex, large scale IT projects towards simpler SaaS plans as the economy flounders. To take advantage of this, it plans to focus on developing its SaaS platform, which now has 28 customers, and Index Data Service.

Justin Wheatley, chief executive, Statpro, says: "Due to the predictable nature of our rental business model, an extremely high level of visibility of revenues and a strong new business pipeline, we expect this growth to continue."

The upbeat update comes after a difficult year which saw a 45% drop in pre-tax profit for the first half of 2008. In October the company had to raise £2 million in a share placing to boost its working capital to improve financial position and mitigate any disruption to its existing banking arrangements with Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander, which was placed into administration.

Statpro shares were down 0.5 pence, or 1.27%, to 39.7 pence in mid-morning trading.