Analysis: Boom times

The UK's top VARs are substantially outgrowing the wider IT market, CRN analysis indicates

The global IT market may have contracted by five per cent in 2015, according to Gartner, but the vast majority of the UK's top resellers, SIs and MSPs managed to defy this and grow revenues in their most recent financial year.

Stripping out the firms whose revenues were artificially bolstered by transformational acquisitions (such as Maintel and Capita), and those for which a year-on-year comparison was not possible, 71 of the top 100 grew and only 15 shrank. What's more, some of those whose sales dropped back (for instance SCC and TSG) said they had deliberately forsaken easy revenues as they transition towards higher-margin services.

The average percentage growth experienced by these 86 firms was 11.83 per cent. Cumulative revenue growth for this 86 was lower, at 6.2 per cent, partly reflecting the flat results at some of the larger players, such as Computacenter and SCC.

The top 100 boasted total revenues of £12.72bn, up 12.9 per cent year on year, partly reflecting our decision to include a raft of new faces in the research this year.

Top 10 for growth (excludes companies that have grown through a transformational acquisition)

1) SoftwareONE 78%

2) Olive Communications 63%

3) Bell Integration 55%

4) GBM Digital 51%

5) Red Stack Technology 47%

6) Edenhouse Solutions 37%

7) RedstoneConnect 36%

8) eBECS 36%

9) Vohkus 34%

10) Dimension Data 33%