Lancashire VARs tie knot in £20m union

'Box shifter' ProfileIT joins forces with Lanway to aid services transition

Two Lancashire-based resellers have joined forces to create a £20m powerhouse.

Burnley-based Lanway has merged with ProfileIT, the B2B arm of e-tailer Cleverboxes, which is based just two miles down the road in Altham.

Talking to CRN, Cleverboxes and ProfileIT owner Vernon Yerkess said splitting the firm in two would allow Cleverboxes to focus on B2C while allowing ProfileIT, which has about 1,000 active B2B customers, to move upstream into services.

"We have done very well in being a box shifter selling a lot of hardware and software but we don't have a solution wraparound," said Yerkess, who will now sit on ProfileIT's board alongside running Cleverboxes. Seven other staff will move across to Lanway's offices via the deal.

"This allows us to layer Lanway's services into the existing customers we have and will mean we are now above the radar with more vendors," Yerkess added.

HP, Lenovo and Toshiba partner ProfileIT, whose business is based on an acquisition Cleverboxes made of the customer base of a Birmingham-based firm last year, boasts a turnover of nearly £6m. Lanway is projecting a turnover of £14m for its current financial year, meaning the combined entity has a revenue runrate of about £20m.

A previous partnership between the duo saw ProfileIT resell Lanway's services and Yerkess said it was clear there was scope for a formal merger.

Lanway managing director Andrew Henderson (pictured) argued the share-based deal, details of which have not been disclosed, made perfect sense for both parties.

"We are both nationwide but our customer bases don't cross over," Henderson said. "They don't really sell services apart from [HP] Carepacks, but we do. We can sell our professional and hosted cloud services into that group of 1,000 new customers."

Lanway has enacted only one other piece of M&A in its history, comms provider Talkwire in 2002, but Henderson said the VAR will be hungry for more deals once it has completed the integration of ProfileIT - which will take Lanway's brand name.

"We are very similar culturally as they're just down the road from us so touch wood the merger will go very smoothly," Henderson said, adding that Lanway will receive any B2B leads that land on Cleverboxes' B2C website as part of the deal.