SCC’s cross-sell agenda “will never stop”, one of its directors has asserted, as it unveiled its third sizeable UK acquisition inside 12 months.
The £3.3bn-revenue juggernaut today announced it has bought 150-employee Microsoft Teams ace Resonate, in a move that doubles the size of its collaboration business.
It follows SCC’s purchase of “classic reseller” Vohkus in March 2023 and digital transformation consultancy Nimble in September.
“What you’re seeing is a strategy to bring an expanded portfolio of offerings to our customers, on both the reselling and services side,” SCC’s Head of Strategy and Corporate Development, Christine Olmsted, told IT Channel Oxygen.
“Each of the acquisitions is quite different.
“Vohkus was about giving us a play in the lower midmarket and upper SMB space on the VAR side, to bring our services into those customers.
“Nimble was about bringing bespoke digital transformation to [our] customers.
“This one gives us more capability in an area where we already had quite a lot – but it’s a unique offering on the services side of that.”
Olmsted added: “Our cross-sell agenda never stops, because the pace of technology change doesn’t stop. We will continue to look at companies that bring our clients something new.”
Acquisition a year in the making
Counting an unnamed 180,000-seat energy giant among its enterprise-leaning client base, 150-strong Resonate offers cloud voice and collaboration services based on Microsoft Teams.
Some 45-46% of its revenues are generated from managed services.
The acquisition fills a gap in SCC’s collaboration business it first identified 12 months ago, SCC Collaboration Managing Director Graham Fry said.
“We’ve been growing the collaboration business within SCC for a long time. We acquired my business [avsnet, in 2018], then we acquired Visavvi [in 2022],” he told IT Channel Oxygen.
“A lot of the specialties on the Visavvi side were more around the Teams meeting room experience [rather than Teams telephony]. We had a RingCentral practice, a Cisco practice, and latterly Zoom, but we were more reselling in those areas and there was little IP.
“Whereas SCC is strong in all other parts of Microsoft, it was very hard for us to differentiate in Teams telephony because we didn’t have that managed service.
“So about a year ago, we started looking at: do we build or do we go out and acquire? As part of that, we looked at Resonate, and it ticked a lot of boxes.”
Headquartered in London but with 60% of its staff based in Slovakia, Resonate works mainly with UK-based, international clients in sectors including oil & gas, finance, manufacturing and retail.
“Another thing that was holding us back in that space was a lack of big reference customers,” Fry said.
“If you’ve got a company that has a client with 180,000 seats, suddenly that gives you a lot of referenceability.”
“We have struggled to break into Microsoft”
SCC will operate Resonate as a separate company under the guidance of CEO Bob Garcia, who founded it in 2015.
Despite the boom in Microsoft Teams uptake during the pandemic, Resonate has enjoyed more of a bounce since lockdown ended, Garcia said.
“We didn’t see our business grow as rapidly during Covid as some others did,” he told IT Channel Oxygen.
“That’s because our business is much more focused on the telephony side than on collaboration. What we’re seeing now is the uptake of the telephony being accelerated post-Covid. They’re looking at their existing estates and are recognising that they don’t use as much of their IPT and latent telephony anymore, and it’s better for them to move to this type of solution. The telephony side is the complex side of it, and that’s the space we deal in.”
Resonate will gain better access to Microsoft itself through the deal, Garcia emphasised.
“We have really struggled to break into the Microsoft area. We have put our backs into it, but we just haven’t been able to achieve the returns,” he said.
“When I met [Rigby Group Co-CEO] Steve Rigby, he spoke to us about how they’d built that relationship. They’d managed to get to where we needed to be. We sort of thought, if SCC had to put that kind of energy and time into it, are we ever going to be able to make a dent?”
“We’re aiming to become top three within the [Microsoft] telephony world”
The acquisition comes 15 months after SCC unveiled a £300m M&A warchest designed to “consolidate its position as Europe’s largest private investor in technology”.
Alongside its £881m UK business, which ranked 6th in IT Channel Oxygen’s recent Oxygen 250 report, SCC has a more product-focused £2.3bn-revenue French business, and circa £100m Spanish arm.
At the same time, SCC parent Rigby Group also committed a further £150m of equity to support further technology investments – under the banner of Rigby Technology Investments. The ploy has since seen it acquire three firms under the CloudClevr brand (the latest of which, Bamboo, was announced in January).
SCC is among a number of large trade acquirers to come back to market in recent months. boxxe owner and serial investor Phil Doye signalled his intent to continue acquiring in the channel when his firm bought Total Computers last month, with Bechtle, Advania and Econocom among the overseas trade buyers also on the hunt.
The Resonate acquisition doubles the headcount of SCC’s collaboration business to 300.
“The goals are very clear,” Fry said.
“Within the audio-visual and meeting room space, our goal was to be top three. With this acquisition, we’re aiming to become top three within the [Microsoft] telephony world.
“There are some big players like Gamma and BT, but a lot of their clients are in the SMB space, where we don’t play. So when we say top three, we’re looking at the midmarket and above. That’s where we hope to get to through this acquisition and over the next three years.”
Olmsted added: “It’s also worth pointing out that Resonate is growing fast. And what they’ve built is unique and scalable.”
“The strategy for SCC was about bringing expertise on Teams for all of our clients around the world, not just UK clients,” she concluded.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
