Logicalis confirms TBC buy and looks for more

Purchase of IBM reseller part of VAR's plan to generate £1bn within 12 months

Acquisition hungry VAR Logicalis Group has snapped up IBM Premier Partner TBC for an undisclosed sum as part of its efforts to generate £1bn within 12 months.

Ian Cook, chief executive of Logicalis, said: “This acquisition accelerates our growth into the pSeries server arena and expands our managed services in the application hosting space. TBC will be integrated into our Computing Solutions division from January.”

TBC supplies managed services and advanced computing infrastructures built around the Unix server range, as well as database applications and IBM middleware.

Last month Logicalis also said that it would double its turnover within the next two years, putting it on a level pegging with Computacenter.

Cook claimed this latest acquisition now positions Logicalis a step closer to its turnover ambition.

“This is part of our double-revenue growth goal and puts us on our way. We will continue to grow organically and supplement that growth with complementary acquisitions and, although we currently have nothing on the cards, we are constantly putting out feelers,” he said.

TBC, as well as being an IBM pSeries server VAR, also works with CRM behemoth Oracle, which recently acquired Siebel, and with virtualisation vendor VMware.

Alastair Edwards, senior analyst at Canalys, said: “The channel is still under a lot of margin pressure and the market will continue to consolidate. Logicalis clearly recognises that, so scale is becoming important.

“Acquiring an IBM partner may gain mindshare with Big Blue, but it needs to gain coverage with all the other large industry vendors as well.”

In July Logicalis acquired Hawke Systems, a Hewlett-Packard (HP) Storage Elite partner for an undisclosed sum, helping to boost its HP relationship and take it further into the storage arena.