Logicalis, part of South African network services vendor Datatec, has bought Croydon, UK-based TBC for an undisclosed sum. TBC makes annual sales of around GBP30m ($54m) from reselling and providing related managed services around IBM’s Unix servers, databases and middleware.
The deal is similar to Logicalis’ takeover of UK-based IBM services company Notability in March, which also added around GBP30m ($54m) in revenue. Logicalis focuses on mid-market clients, typically with between 500 to 1,500 seats.
Datatec said that the takeover of TBC takes its annual revenue run-rate in the UK to GBP125m ($225m). At a global level, the company is aiming to grow its annual sales from $600m last year to $1.8bn in the next twelve months, and has been expanding aggressively through acquisition.
Ian Cooke, CEO of Logicalis in the UK, said the company is of a sufficient size to take on the UK’s largest server resellers, Computacenter and Morse. Both companies have struggled against declining margins on their product reselling activities, but Cooke said that Logicalis’ was taking a more services-focused approach to the server business.
Those companies are coming at it much more from the angle of fulfillment, but we always want to have a services-led stream, and a strong element of annuity revenue running through our contracts, he said. We don’t want to just be pushing tin.
