Ambitious US reseller PCM makes UK acquisition

US reseller turbo-charges UK growth plans with acquisition of Liverpudlian player

US reseller giant PCM has pressed fast-forward on its UK growth plans by acquiring Liverpool-based cloud service provider Stack Technology Holdings.

PCM broke the mould for US resellers entering the UK by starting a local operation from scratch in May, but hinted at the time that it may look to back this up with an acquisition.

With revenues last year of £2.9m, Stack bills itself as a specialist in cloud, security, virtualisation, data services, unified communications and infrastructure, and has two accredited cloud datacentres.

PCM said the acquisition would turbo-charge its efforts to pick up vendor badges on this side of the Atlantic, and boost its managed services prowess.

"The acquisition of The Stack Group is a key milestone for our new UK segment to further support our clients' needs in the services and solutions market," said PCM CEO Frank Khulusi.

"As a leading provider in North America, we continue to look for ways to accelerate market share gains and this acquisition will allow us to expand on our offerings not only to new customers in the UK and European markets, but also to our global customers based in North America. We are pleased to welcome The Stack Group team to the rest of the PCM family and look forward to jointly providing world-class services and solutions to our clients across the globe."

With a presence in the US, Canada and the UK, PCM hit revenues of $2.3bn (£1.7bn) in its year ending 30 June 2017. On touching down in the UK, it set out plans to hire 90 people on this side of the pond by the end of the year.

On the vendor front, Stack will add muscle around Cisco, Citrix, Dell EMC, Fortinet Meru, NetApp, Nutanix, Sophos, Veeam, VMware, Ubiquiti Networks and Zerto, PCM said.