The new business, which will focus on the managed data services sector, follows the sale last November of Mills’ previous venture, SpiriTel, to AIM-listed communications business Daisy Group for £27 million.

Six Degrees was founded through the acquisitions of data centre provider UKSolutions, technology business NetworkFlow and voice player Protel. It is supported by investment from Penta Capital, which backed SpiriTel.

According to a statement, Six Degrees Group wants to capitalise on what it believes is the ‘tipping point’ in technology, with its research showing that workers see their own personal technology as better than that provided by their employers, and want to use it as an extension to existing work services.

However Mills believes that UK plc is still stuck in the 1990s, with many employers ‘disabling and controlling’ when they should be ‘enabling and empowering’.

Mills hopes that his new venture will become the most admired mid-market provider of managed data services. His team has developed a cloud-based voice ‘business continuity and disaster recovery service’ called Livenumber, which it says has been adopted by legal and financial services companies.

He adds: ‘Public cloud services like iCloud and Amazon Web Services have captured the imagination of consumers but these are not enterprise-grade products. Our private cloud is built for business and we see the benefits as being transformational.’

Six Degrees, at launch, employs just under 100 staff and serves 1,200 business customers. It has four offices, with two in London and one in Glasgow and Warwickshire.