Accumuli snaps up Boxing Orange for £7.6m

Aggressive buy-and-build security specialist agrees largest deal yet

Buy-and-build newcomer Accumuli is to pay up to £7.6m to buy security services player Boxing Orange, its third acquisition inside six months and its largest to date.

The London-listed outfit will lay out an initial £5.48m, evenly split between cash and shares, for Leeds-based ArcSight, Check Point, RSA and Websense partner. Included in the deal are wholly owned subsidiaries Boxing Orange MMS and Webscreen Systems. A further £2.1m in cash will be payable, subject to performance.

Accumuli chairman Graham Norfolk said: "We are delighted to announce the third acquisition in our stated strategy of building a managed IT security services business. Boxing Orange provides the company with an established, profitable, managed service capability with significant opportunities to cross-sell complementary services across the company's customer base. We look forward in the near future to providing further updates upon our acquisition strategy."

Accumili came into being last year and was built on the remnants of Cisco partner NetServices, the trading operations of which were sold to GCI Com in May 2010. With buy-and build veteran Ian Smith serving as executive director, the Salford firm was quickly in acquisition action, snaring Tuscany Networks in a £4m reverse takeover in November. The following month it coughed up £2m for security integrator Fujin.