What’s the biggest story of the year?
Wonder no more…We’ve dug through our archives to bring you the definitive rundown of the nine biggest storylines that shook the UK IT channel in 2025…
9. Race to £1bn hots up
The race to be the UK’s next £1bn-revenue channel partner heated up in 2025 as both boxxe and Trustmarque made blockbuster M&A moves.
In July, boxxe CEO Phil Doye re-iterated the York-based outfit’s ambitions to join the ten-figure club following its purchase of £160m-revenue Cisco, Microsoft and Dell partner CAE Technology Services, saying doing so is necessary for it to “be relevant”.
“Whilst the £1bn is an arbitrary number, if you get there you’ve effectively demonstrated you have enough scale to be able to compete with the large competitors,” he told IT Channel Oxygen.
Just three months later, Trustmarque CEO Simon Williams also characterised £1bn GII as a “magic marker” following its merger with Ultima.
“I’m thinking of [the deal] as either a jigsaw or a yinyang, where you have multiple pieces coming together to create a beautiful picture,” Williams said.
But boxxe and Trustmarque aren’t the only ones eager to add another digit to their annual sales ledger.
Mainland Europe’s largest reseller, Bechtle, now sees £1bn as its ultimate mid-term revenue goal for its UK business, local leader James Napp revealed earlier this month, with Nordic outfit Advania another overseas outfit that has supercharged its UK business to approaching £500m revenues via M&A.
8 stories were bigger than this one. See following page for more…
