Revenue: £216.8m (+66%)
Staff: 934
This Macquarie Capital-backed MSP created a £500m-revenue giant last summer when it acquired similar-sized peer Daisy Corporate Services. The Solihull-based outfit saw revenues rocket by almost two-thirds to £216.8m in its year to 31 March 2024 (with 2023 acquisition Adept contributing £66.9m to the total). It will complete its integration of Daisy CS by 31 March 2025, CRO Mark Phillips told IT Channel Oxygen in December (see Q&A, below).
Oxygen ice-breaker
The enlarged Wavenet business counts Microsoft, Extreme Networks, Fortinet, Content Guru, Five9 and 8×8 among its top-ten vendors, Phillips revealed.
“We will have a fully integrated business by March”
Wavenet last summer created a £500m-revenue giant when it acquired Daisy Corporate Services. CRO Mark Phillips claims its integration will be completed within the next two months.
What do Daisy CS and Wavenet each bring to the table, and is it fair to say Daisy was more large-enterprise focused?
That’s fair to say.
Wavenet have some larger customers that a lot of people aren’t aware of – for example, we run the contact centre for the DVLA and NHS 111. But Daisy brings us 2,000 enterprise-scale customers. Wavenet certainly had a very high volume of customers that fall into the 200-5,000 seat bracket.
Daisy had a very scaled and capable cloud business, predominantly on technologies like VMware and HPE in the private cloud area, and also Azure in the public cloud. While Wavenet had a couple of hundred customers in that space, it wasn’t as scaled as Daisy.
Conversely, Wavenet had a much more scaled cyber business than Daisy did.
If you look at growth opportunities for the whole market, cyber and cloud would feature in everybody’s top five. So the fact we can scale cyber in one direction and cloud in the other gives us an immediate, very obvious set of things to focus on as we combine the two businesses together.
How far through the integration process are you?
We will have a fully integrated business that is integrated completely from a people, process, systems and branding perspective by 31 March.
The majority of Wavenet’s presence was Midlands looking south, whereas the Daisy organisation is a lot more of a northern-based business. There are some opportunities to reduce office space, but it’s not that significant.
Who are your top ten vendors?
Microsoft would be really high on the list. Organisations like Extreme Networks, Fortinet, Content Guru, Five9 and 8×8 would all certainly fall into our top 10 providers.
With a lot of our vendors, we may have been number two or three separately, but all of a sudden we’re now their biggest partner.
To what extent should the deal been seen as a plain acquisition rather than a marriage of equals?
If you looked at it from a financial perspective, it’s an acquisition. But if you looked at it in terms of the practicalities of bringing the two organisations together, it’s much more like a merger.
That’s because we were roughly of equivalent size, and because there were a lot of things in the Daisy business that were more advanced or more mature than they were within Wavenet.
