MITSG 'announces itself' to the MSP market with CSS Group acquisition

Business led by former GCI leadership team promises more M&A this year

Newly-formed MSP Managed IT Services Group (MITSG) has "announced itself" as a real contender in the UK MSP market after acquiring London-based CSS Group for an undisclosed sum.

MITSG was founded in November 2020, according to Companies House, and is led by the former executive team of unified comms giant GCI.

GCI's former CEO is now non-executive chairman of the MITSG business, while Mark Allen is CFO and Phil Smith is COO.

GCI rebranded to Nasstar last year following its acquisition of the AIM-listed business, which propelled its revenues to almost £120m.

MITSG claims the acquisition of CSS Group brings its headcount to 70 across the UK and gives it new IT services expertise in the legal and professional services sectors.

CSS Group is made up of three businesses: Charles Street Solutions, MICL and Opus UK.

It marks the Manchester-based firm's third and largest acquisition since it was founded, following its buyout of Manchester-based peer IT Farm in May 2021 and Nexbridge Communications a few months later.

MITSG was funded through both director and private investment and claims to have an "aggressive expansion strategy" planned.

Allen said that the CSS acquisition is the ideal time for the business to announce itself as a new player in the UK managed services space.

"[It] gives us the scale needed to aggressively target the UK small and medium business market. We believe SMEs in the UK are currently poorly served with providers that are either too small to offer the full complement of IT services, or too big to care. Many of the former are ‘generalists' meaning they have a broad portfolio of tenuously related services which lack the credibility of a genuine technology specialist," he said.

Smith added: "MITSG has been established to offer SMEs the full range of managed services across four distinct specialist units - cloud and remote desktop; networks & security; voice and contact centre; and IT managed services. Each of these units are staffed by experts in their given areas. There will be further acquisitions by the group throughout 2022 to allow us to create depth and balance in our product and service portfolio."