7. Bluecube
Acquirer: Ekco
When: December
Deal size: Undisclosed, but Bluecube turned over £18.6m in its fiscal 2023.
How it started:
Having already purchased three UK MSPs in the previous 12 months, Irish outfit Ekco stepped things up a notch in December 2023 by making its largest acquisition to date in the form of Bluecube.
Based in Milton Keynes, Bluecube has over 200 staff. Its fiscal 2023 revenues grew from £16.1m to £18.6m.
The move doubled the size of managed cloud and cyber specialist Ekco’s UK business and propelled overall revenues beyond €150m.
Bluecube has a 24x7x365 security operations centre that will enable Ecko to deliver IT security services to its UK customers.
What happened next:
With the dust still settling on the deal, there’s not much to add. Except… watch out for Ekco in 2024 – it has now made four UK acquisitions (Bluecube, Radius, xTEN and iSYSTEMS) since selling a majority share to private equity house Corten Capital in October 2022.
The VMware, Veeam, Zerta, Microsoft and AWS partner now employs 860 staff in Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands and the US.
There were 6 bigger trade acquisitions this year. See next page…
