BT flogs £50m VAR to Bechtle

German VAR offloaded to Bechtle as BT's restructuring continues

BT has sold its €60m-revenue (£52.62m) comms and networking specialist to German giant Bechtle.

BT Stemmer has 160 employees and trades across six locations in Germany: Munich, Duisburg, Karlsruhe, Cologne, Siegen and Stuttgart. The purchase price was not disclosed.

BT Stemmer brands itself as a networking and comms specialist and holds top-level vendor badges with Cisco and NetApp, but also partners with VMware, Microsoft, Citrix and Riverbed among others. Upon the deal's conclusion, the firm will drop the BT name and will trade as Stemmer.

The Munich-based firm has been part of BT since 2009 when the British Telecom giant made a double acquisition in Germany, also snapping up networking firm SND.

"BT Stemmer strengthens us in a critical business area as network competence is becoming increasingly important for hybrid cloud architectures. BT Stemmer has a wealth of experience in this field and is a reliable, well-established IT partner for a multitude of companies and public sector clients. We are especially pleased to welcome almost 160 highly qualified specialists to the Bechtle Group," said Michael Guschlbauer, COO of IT systems integration and managed services at Bechtle.

It claims to serve around 850 customers, including SMB and mid-market clients as well as public sector and enterprise level, and delivers projects both domestically and overseas.

"We are delighted that BT Stemmer is joining Bechtle," said Bas Burger, CEO Global Services at BT.

"This is great news for the customers and employees of BT Stemmer as the deal will deliver continuity and opportunities for growth. It is also great news for BT as it carries out a strategy focusing its global resources on the network, cloud and security needs of a defined set of 800 multinational companies. BT remains strong in Germany where we count many of the largest global brands among our customers, operate a significant network and run a state-of-the-art security operations centre."

Bechtle's latest buyout comes just three months after it made its largest-ever acquisition in the shape of €420m-turnover French reseller Inmac Wstore. The BT Stemmer deal marks Bechtle's fourth acquisition of the year, having previously acquired two small Swiss Microsoft partners - Acommit in January and Evolusys in May.