Indian outsourcing company HCL has completed its £440m acquisition of UK SAP consultancy Axon Group.

Earlier this year the buyout was given the green light by Axon shareholders (Channelweb, 24 November). The firm will be incorporated into the HCL family under the new name HCL Axon.

Vineet Nayar, chief executive of HCL said: "A blue ocean thinking to create uncontested market spaces is an underpinning of the HCL transformation story. The merger of Axon and HCL SAP presents a great opportunity to bring new capabilities to the market with a truly global delivery model providing the full lifecycle suite of services.

"HCL has a long history of experience in ensuring smooth integration and preserving the identity and character of the companies we acquire, and we welcome Axon employees into the HCL family."

Steve Cardell, president of HCL Axon, said: "HCL Axon has enormous potential given the complementary strengths of Axon and HCL SAP practice. The current capability gap prevents vendors from addressing the full opportunity. As HCL Axon, we will be combining Axon's strong business benefit-led consulting and implementation capabilities with HCL's strong global delivery based application and infrastructure management capabilities.

"We are confident of being able to leapfrog competition in delivery value on an end to end basis for customers that have chosen SAP as their strategic technology platform and whose business challenge is transformation."