'We want to be the hunter, not the hunted' - Maintel on M&A strategy and Daisy takeover approach

Rufus Grig talks to CRN about future M&A activity and wanting to grow its partner ecosystem

Maintel's M&A strategy remains unchanged despite being the subject of a takeover approach by rival Daisy.

The cloud and comms provider rebuffed these advances and is busy working on its own M&A growth strategy, according to Rufus Grig, chief strategy officer.

He told CRN that while its acquisition track record has been to add scale to the business, the focus is now on adding new capabilities to its offering.

"We're definitely looking to be the hunter, rather than the hunted," he stated.

"Some of the acquisitions we've done in the past have really been about scale and we absolutely have that scale now. So the sorts of acquisitions that we will be looking at now are about including a breadth of capability. The board and our shareholders are absolutely behind our plans of growth, particularly our growth in cloud and what we can achieve."

Aim-listed Maintel, which is ranked #30 in CRN's VAR 350, recently revealed that it grew by nearly a third in 2020, with its cloud contracted seats soaring from 78,000 to 102,000.

Grig said he believed the spike would've occured regardless of the pandemic, which forced a mass migration from organisations across all sectors to the cloud.

"If I'm honest, I don't think I particularly do attribute much of last year's growth to the pandemic. I think we would have had it anyway and we're just genuinely seeing an acceleration," he stated.

"The question people were asking a couple of years ago was ‘Is cloud right for us?' and I don't think that's the question they're asking anymore. The question now is, ‘Which cloud is right for us?' and in some of those very exacting and demanding environments, our cloud performs very well."

Grig was coy to elaborate on how this increase in contracted seats will affect its topline figures but he did admit it changes the company's revenue profile.

"Rather than seeing a big lumpy project delivery and sale upfront we now have a recurring income over the term of the contract," he explained.

"It just slightly changes the revenue profile, which is common in the transition to cloud and subscription models."

Around a third of Maintel's growth in 2020 came from its channel, and it intends to grow this figure again this year and has already signed up a number of systems integrators (SI) to deliver its ICON cloud services.

"We want to do more than 30 per cent [through the channel] this year," he stated.

"For example, for ICON Communicate - which is our real mission-critical cloud service - we have a number of SI partners that we work with and we've increased that over the last year. We've signed a couple of major SI partners, who will be providing broader IT transformational service into either the public sector or the private sector."