Logicalis raids Avisen's Inca treasure

Buy-and-build specialist Avisen to plough proceeds of Inca sale into acquisition strategy

Buy-and-build specialist Avisen has agreed to sell off its IBM Cognos reseller division Inca to Logicalis for £8.65m.

Under the terms of the deal, Logicalis will stump up £6m when the deal closes on 1 April and then a further £1.3m 12 months later. It has also agreed to cover Inca's net liabilities, amounting to £1.35m.

According to the latest set of financial results for Inca, which cover the six months to 31 July 2010, revenues topped £4.36m and the firm made a pre-tax profit of £300,000.

The proceeds of the sale will be used by Avisen to finance its ongoing buy-and-build activities, and support the launch of its SaaS storage analytics platform.

Marcus Hanke, chief executive of Avisen, said that having acquired Inca for £3.5m in 2009, the deal represented an excellent return on investment for the firm.

"I would like to thank the senior management team of Inca for their help in growing the business to this stage and I look forward to providing further positive announcements as we seek to implement our ongoing growth strategy," he said.

Tom Kelly, managing director of Logicalis UK (pictured), said the firm will use Inca's expertise to launch a cloud-based IBM Cognos tool to the mid-market.

"Logicalis UK's unique triple-play capabilities in analytics, collaboration and cloud computing positions us as one of the few organisations able to execute on the transformation necessities of UK businesses and government," he said.

"Our offerings of business analytics as a solution and business analytics as a cloud service will be a unique and compelling proposition to our customers."