French IT services company GFI Informatique SA has paid an unspecified sum for a 60% stake in Excellence in Computing Solutions (ECS) Ltd, a UK outfit specializing in complex heterogeneous networks and the development of communications infrastructures.
The acquisition represents a significant increase in the Paris-based GFI, which until now was limited to an implementation at the Thanet Computer Center in the country’s south-eastern region. With ECS, it now has office’s in Birmingham (the new subsidiary’s HQ), London and Strathclyde, in Scotland, as well as inheriting a number of other implementations. ECS also comes with several partnerships with networking equipment manufacturers such as Nortel, Cisco and Lucent.
GFI says it is pursuing an aggressive strategy of growth through acquisitions (CI No 3,593), and intends to derive 25% of this year’s revenue from European countries other than France.
