This feature appeared in Oxygen 250 2025. IT Channel Oxygen members can view the full report here.
A rash of industry consolidation means our rankings don’t quite reflect the true scale of several acquisitive powerhouses in Oxygen 250 2025.
Having all made large acquisitions last year, 12th-ranked boxxe, 14th-ranked XMA, 18th-ranked Wavenet and 25th-ranked Advania are now circa £625m, £550m, £500m and £470m runrate businesses, respectively.
Bechtle is another market consolidator whose most recent reported UK numbers do its enlarged scale little justice.
As boxxe CEO Phil Doye himself acknowledged, a scale race is heating up among those chasing £1bn-revenue-plus giants such as Softcat and CDW.
“We feel like we’ve got to get to £1bn as soon as possible,” he told IT Channel Oxygen at the time it acquired 62nd-ranked Total Computers.
“Our business model is not about niche specialisation in certain areas. It’s about having a broad portfolio of products and solutions that address the widest set of customers and their needs. The combined business is going to be somewhere around £625m in 2024, which gives us a really good base to start thinking about how we get to £1bn quickly.”
Advania UK CEO Geoff Kneen spoke about its ability to now act as a “single trusted partner” to its customers following its double swoop on Servium and CCS Media.
“We talk about from a strategy point of view internally how we don’t want our clients to have to go anywhere else for their strategic technology needs,” he told IT Channel Oxygen in October.
“You’re never going to be 100% of the way there, but this takes us a huge step forward in that area.
“Clients still have Cisco, HP or Dell in their estates – they’ve still got on-premise capabilities and networking capabilities. This means we can now offer that deep service pedigree across the entire technology estate for our clients, so that we are that single trusted partner.”
