boxxe has characterised its purchase of £160m-revenue CAE Technology Services as a “rare opportunity” to acquire a top-level Cisco partner.
The York-based public sector specialist resolved to rapidly scale in the corporate sector when it bought Total Computers last February.
At the time of the Total deal, boxxe CEO Doye characterised CAE as one of “very few buyable businesses” besides Total in the £100m-£500m-revenue range.
Now boxxe has moved to snap up Hemel Hempstead-based CAE, which turned over £159.8m in its year to 30 June 2024.
The deal was announced a day after IT Channel Oxygen’s round up of the top 12 UK VAR and MSP acquisitions of 2025 so far, and two days after global Microsoft partners SoftwareOne and Crayon completed their union.
“I continue to be impressed”
Ranking 24th in Oxygen 250 2025, CAE boasts top-level partnerships with Microsoft, Dell and Cisco.
With boxxe already recognised as one of Microsoft’s top UK licensing partners and holding coveted Titanium status with Dell, it was CAE’s Gold status with the latter (recently held up by Computacenter CEO Mike Norris as notoriously tough to obtain) that was the real appeal.
The deal “represents a rare opportunity for boxxe to acquire one of the UK’s leading Cisco partners”, it said.
In a press release, Doye said that he had “followed CAE for many years and continue[s] to be impressed by the organisation’s market-leading practices in networking, security, and cloud infrastructure”.
CAE “sets itself apart from the competition with its focus on customer outcomes”, Doye said, pinpointing CAE’s inhouse software development arm CAE Labs as an example.
“boxxe’s scale and broad portfolio of products and solutions will also bring greater value and relevance to CAE’s many customers,” he said.
CAE saw revenues fall from £180.3m to £159.8m in its year to 30 June 2024 as political and economic uncertainty “caused delays in spend approval and cancellation of network projects, most noticeably in public sector where there was a shift of spend away from technology”.
The acquisition has seen CAE CEO Justin Harling resign from CAE parent company Caerus Assets and all its subsidiaries, with Doye becoming Group CEO and Hazel Sagar Group CFO.
Ranking 12th in Oxygen 250 2025, boxxe said it will integrate CAE into its business “some time in the next 12 months” (it took around seven months to retire the Total Computers brand).
