GCI thwarts rival suitors to land highly profitable Blue Chip

Acquisitive Microsoft partner says addition of Blue Chip will enable it to add 'fifth pillar' of full IT support to its repertoire

Acquisitive Microsoft partner GCI says it had to see off multiple interested parties to land its biggest acquisition to date, Poole-based Blue Chip.

Following its acquisitions of Freedom and Outsourcery, GCI has acquired the managed services provider for an undisclosed sum, propelling its turnover run rate to £95m and headcount to 500.

Microsoft, HP, Citrix, EMC and VMware partner Blue Chip has 190 staff, revenues north of £20m and has one of the highest operating margins in the channel.

GCI chief executive Adrian Thirkill told CRN that Blue Chip will enable GCI to add national IT support as a fifth pillar of its offering alongside UC-as-a-service (UCaaS), cloud, security and compliance, and network and infrastructure.

"In the digitisation of business in the UK, whether that's large SME, corporate or government, you've got to be able to manage IT and business outcomes end to end," Thirkill said. "We couldn't provide national IT managed services at an acceptable level. But now we have that capability - a fifth pillar - that we can provide to our existing customer base who've been asking for it. Secondly, we have 300 Blue Chip customers who don't have the UCaaS and other services that we can provide, so it's a win-win."

Thirkill would not disclose the terms of the deal, but confirmed that GCI has now spent a "large portion" of the £50m M&A war chest it secured in October. Blue Chip's top executives have taken a shareholding in GCI, he confirmed.

"We were talking a while beforehand; from first contact to completion was probably about four months," he said.

"It wasn't a free run because there were one or two other parties that had already been looking at Blue Chip, but we were by far the best partner fit for them; it wasn't just based on the best price paid."

GCI had been in talks with one other MSP but Blue Chip was "the better option of the two by far", Thirkill added.

In its last set of figures on Companies House, Blue Chip posted an operating profit of £3.36m on revenues of £20.7m, equating to an operating margin of 16.1 per cent.

"They have 300 customers, a very low share, are constantly growing, are constantly bringing in new customers, are constantly making good margins on it, are training their people, have a very low attrition rate, and are a happy ship," Thirkill said. "What more do you want?"

GCI said the addition of Blue Chip would bolster its consultancy skills in areas such as GDPR, and Thirkill said his firm had recently run a series of events alongside Microsoft and Polycom to talk to customers about how it can help them comply with the incoming regulations.

"The contracts and the services that you provide have to be done very clearly, so that people understand where the positions of the two parties reside," he said.

GCI has now acquired five firms inside 18 months, and Thirkill would not rule out further transactions.

"If you're running a business which is providing digital transformation in the UK, you're constantly looking at what the market is doing, what customers require going forward, what skills do we have in-house, what can we organically grow or train up or partner a vendor to do, and what will a new acquisition mean in order for us to take a quantum leap forward on that capability," he said.

"That will always happen. So will there be acquisitions in the future? Yes. Do I know exactly what yet? No."