Daisy spin-out Allvotec makes first acquisition

CEO Glen Williams opens up on rationale for buying ISG Technology and why he is confident about economic growth next year

Daisy spin-out Allvotec has made its first acquisition in the form of Egham-based Cisco partner ISG Technology.

Allvotec - previously known as Daisy Partner Services - was rebranded earlier this year to underline its separation from its parent company.

CEO Glen Williams told CRN that the capabilities that ISG brings to Allvotec's portfolio highlight its autonomy from Daisy. These include networking, WiFi and physical infrastructure offerings.

"ISG Technology is actually a partner of ours and we've been working with them for a while now," Williams said.

"When we were talking to them about potentially sending more business their way, we got to understand a bit more about their company, and we thought actually this would make a very good addition to our own business.

"An area that we could probably do with beefing up our resources would be in the networking space. And that's exactly the space ISG plays in.

"Technologically, it fits perfectly with what we do - it gives us more WiFi skills and more LAN capabilities around things like Cisco. They also do a lot of cabling work and we found that when we were doing a WiFi deployment or part of it for a company, ISG was doing the physical infrastructure, so it made sense to put the two things together."

ISG's 175 employees spanning its UK office and Network Operation Centre (NOC) in Bulgaria will bring Allvotec's total headcount to 1500, as well as adding around £25m in revenues to Allvotec's coffers.

Its operations and name will be gradually folded into the Allvotec brand, Williams added.

However, the CEO was adamant that despite now having a presence in Bulgaria, his priority remains growing organically in the UK.

"We have some international customers who we have to deliver projects to, but primarily we're a UK and Republic of Ireland company - it's a big enough market for us to go after," he stated.

"We've probably got more geographic coverage than anybody else in the UK; we cover 97 per cent of the UK within one hour, in terms of our engineering capability - most people can't get anywhere near that.

"I'm not sure there are many companies out there that are going to help bring any scale to our business unless it's outside the UK. So then the only reason we would buy a business is for something they're bringing to us technically that we can't do ourselves."

The chief exec is optimistic about heading into the next year and the opportunities that lay ahead for both the company and the channel in general.

"[The General Election result] feels like the handbrake has been taken off our country, even though nothing's changed just yet," he said.

"There has been a lot of organisations that have been waiting for something to happen…I'm not saying there's been a slowdown, but from a project perspective, there's been a lot of people pausing and waiting to see what happens in the UK.

" I think now that there's some certainty about what's happening in the UK, my sense is that there's going to be a time at the handbrake is going to be taken off a little bit and I think there's going to be multiple opportunities in the services space."