Axial Systems hungry for acquisitions after turning 25

VAR ready for 'step up in growth' after notching up a quarter of a century in business

Axial Systems' boss has revealed ambitious plans for the networking and security VAR - including potential acquisitions - as it celebrates 25 years in business.

Starting off life in 1989 as a cable testing firm, Axial has grown to become a near £20m-turnover outfit having seeded the UK market for a string of security, WAN optimisation and network analysis vendors including Cinco, NetOptics, Niksun, AirMagnet, Gigamon and APCON.

Mike Simmonds, who took over as managing director 11 months ago, hailed the achievement as a "landmark", but said the plan is to double sales again by 2017, supported by acquisitions.

"I think we're at this critical mass where we can continue bubbling away but we are also capable of supporting a step up in growth," he said.

Axial had thrived by making "bleeding-edge forays" into emerging technologies but supporting this with the revenue it generates from higher-volume, more tactical products such as routers and switches, Simmonds (pictured below) said.

Speaking with the unbridled enthusiasm of a techie - he was technical director at Axial for six years before taking the reins - Simmonds talked up the latest products that are moving through Axial's incubation programme. This includes Talari Networks, which reverse-aggregates wide area networks; and cPacket, a time-stamping tool that Simmonds predicted will soon hit the mainstream.

"cPacket has typically been in the banking customer base where they are looking at time stamping down to nanosecond accuracy, through to being able to look for any packet on any wire, all the time, at 100GB. I think that's pretty cool," he said.

In its most recent annual accounts, for the year to May 2012, private equity-backed Axial posted revenue of £16.95m but Simmonds harbours ambitions to double the tally by investing in marketing and helpdesk resources and making targeted acquisitions.

"We've got close to about four [acquisitions] in the past couple of years," he said.

"The reason they didn't happen is because we want to build on our strengths, not dilute our ability - and the last two I've looked at didn't fit our ethos.

"The last thing I want to do is take Axial, which has been on a real nice, smooth trajectory, and give it indigestion. I need to make sure it augments what we already do. It has to be a good fit for all staff, products and customers and that's not an easy task."

This year will also see the firm, which counts McAfee, Juniper and Aruba among its key tier-one vendor partners, increase its emphasis on security due to the way security is beginning to exploit the networking technologies on which Axial has traditionally focused, Simmonds said.

"The two sides of the business are feeding off each other - we can look at 10GB traffic, just select the unusual things and send them off to the security side of the infrastructure for analysis for packet capture and alerts," he said. "That shift is something we've seen for the past 18 months and now we're changing the business to react to that."

He added: "I was talking to someone recently about how Axial has carried on for so long. Twenty-five years is a bit of a milestone and I think that's because we've not put all our eggs in one basket but the areas in which we are involved are all intimately entwined."