£5m tablet victory for ambitious Sheffield-based VAR

Managed services provider AAG bags contract equal to its entire turnover last year

Fast-growing northern VAR AAG Systems has bagged its biggest ever contract win: a £5m tablet deal with an unnamed private European company.

The deal will see the firm provide tablets over a six to eight-month period and has taken Sheffield-based AAG two and a half years to win, according to managing director Alexa Greaves (pictured left).

It matches the company's whole annual revenue for its last financial year, and Greaves believes this deal could be the first of more of its kind.

"I think this opens the door for us and we are looking at two or three opportunities of a similar nature," Greaves said.

She added that the firm, whose previous biggest contract win was for £500,000, was able to beat off the competition by "offering a bespoke solution that no one else could offer".

"The company we are dealing with has a lot of in-house IT capabilities but when it comes to sourcing a product in the marketplace, we took them all sorts of different offerings to provide them with a solution that meets their needs."

Starting up in 2009, AAG focuses mainly on managed services and partners with the likes of Fujitsu and HP. The firm has also recently secured a partnership with Microsoft on the back of its European tablet deal.

For its last financial year, which ended 31 March, the firm's turnover was £5m, but following this latest tablet deal Greaves hopes it can record £12m in revenue for the upcoming calendar year.

In line with this expansion, AAG is in the process of purchasing a new office in Barlborough, Derbyshire, to replace its existing headquarters in Killamarsh, near Sheffield.

Matt Shore, technical director at AAG, said he felt this recent growth of the firm was driven by its decision to increase its range of Fujitsu products and the company started selling Fujitsu servers earlier this year.

The firm won the Yorkshire and Humberside Small Business of the Year award at the National Chamber Awards 2014 in September.

Lisa Middleton, client relationship manager at AAG, said despite the sharp growth of the firm, it has managed to stay "vendor independent".

"One thing we pride ourselves on is staying as vendor independent as possible. We don't take rebates in order to extenuate sales - if a customer is looking at HP and Fujitsu, we will give them both options, it is not delegated by the number of units we have to sell for a specific vendor," she said.