Kubus is aiming to grow revenue from £30m to £100m and make three more acquisitions, its CEO revealed as he heaped praise on HPE for its “fair and open” approach to lead times.
Jeremy Keefe joined the Cisco, Juniper and HPE partner last October, a year after it snared a £9m investment from BGF, and three years after it rebranded from Hardware.com.
Since then, the networking and compute specialist – which ranked 162nd in Oxygen 250 2026 – has made two small acquisitions in the AV and cabling arenas, respectively, and more than doubled headcount to 120.
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen, Keefe said he was persuaded to join the Cirencester-based outfit on the strength of its three-year growth plan.
This will see Kubus not only grow its top line to £100m, but also boost the portion of revenues it generates from managed services from 8% to 40%.
“We seem to be picked up as a VAR, but we like to call ourselves more of a systems integrator,” Keefe said.
“We aim to be seen as a full-on services provider within the next 12 months with the services we’re launching.
“If we take the business to a £100m top line and the bottom line flows with that, that makes us a meaningful business to our PE backers, and one that more enterprise-class customers want to deal with.”
“Fair and open” HPE
Kubus counts Cisco and HPE/Juniper as its two key vendors, the latter of which Keefe praised for its openness in the wake of its recent partner Ts and Cs changes.
“We’ve seen nothing but fairness and openness from HPE. They’re pretty good at beating lead times right now, and we have a direct contract with them on the Juniper side,” Keefe said.
“We took an order the other week where we got a November lead time – but slowly it comes forward as you go.”
Having shed its roots as an unauthorised Cisco hardware dealer several years ago, today Kubus provides “anything that sits on the network” including server, storage, security, physical security and AV.
As well as providing server, storage and networking product to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which Keefe characterised as the third largest global consumer of data, Kubus recently won PureGym’s expansion into the US.
“Is HSBC or Barclays going to work with us on full-on projects? No, not today, because they will go through the Computacenters, SCCs, Softcats. Will they work with us on very specific projects? Yes, So that’s where we’re looking: specific projects in large enterprise and full on in low to mid enterprise,” Keefe said.
“You can’t be Billy Big”
Kubus’ revenues for it year to 31 March 2026 hit around £34m, a total which rises to “a smidgeon” under £40m when factoring in the pro-forma contribution of the two acquisitions (TenTechnology and Ammcom), Keefe said.
Since Keefe joined, headcount has risen from 57 to 120-125, with a new London office already housing seven sales staff.
Kubus plans to add another 20 technical people to the business in the next three or four months, Keefe revealed.
At the same time, majority shareholder Rory Sweet “is getting more and more involved back in the business”, Keefe said.
“We’re currently looking at potentially two other acquisitions in the next 12 months, and probably one other in the next two years,” he said.
Keefe liked the three-year plan so much, he enlisted the consultant who created it – Nick Westall – to his top team.
“I think it’s a great strategy. I said, ‘come and deliver it with me’. You can’t be Billy Big and go, ‘yeah, I wrote that’, and so I said, ‘if you believe in it 100% like you’re telling us, come and join me as CTO’.”
Kubus’ refreshed leadership team also now includes James Orton as CFO and Katie Hunt as Marketing Director.
“Distribution is a mad, mad place”
This is Keefe’s second CEO role of an IT solutions provider, following a short stint running Logicalis’ UK business.
“I got approached about a month before I joined Kubus for quite a large MD role at a very large global distributor, and I wasn’t interested,” he said.
“Distribution is a mad, mad place at low margin and high volume, and I wasn’t enjoying it.
“I wanted to be back to solutions and selling solutions and driving solutions in the marketplace.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
