The acquisitions boost the customer numbers of the MSP to over 1,000, more than double its original number of 400 as it makes a start to it’s target of growing the business to over £100 million turnover “in the next few years”.
Speaking to UC Today, John Whitty, CEO of Air IT, said that the turnover target would be achieved through organic growth as well as the acquisition drive funded by private equity firm, August Equity Partners LLP. Said Whitty:
“In January this year, August Equity bought a large stake in Air IT as it identified an opportunity to consolidate the managed service provider market that was addressing the SME community”
“August also provided us with the investment funds to go and find similar businesses that we could put together across the UK. Netstar and Microtrading are the first of those but definitely not the last and we intend to find similar companies to build Air IT’s business regionally.”
The Nottinghamshire-based MSP will now use acquisitions as business hubs, as it looks to expand into new territories. To this end, Microtrading and Netstar head offices grew the reach of Air IT to Birmingham and London respectively on top of its headquarters in Nottingham and a second office in Derby.
Whitty identified the North East and North West as targets for the future with further acquisitions in Leeds and Manchester set to be announced in the not too distant future. It is unsure whether acquisitions will be rebranded as Air IT or will be pulled in under the MSP as a group.
Businesses bought by Air IT will have access to all services from Netstar and MicroTrading which includes business analytic tools, security operations centre and its ‘Teams Talk’ direct routing solutions.
“We’ve now got a wider portfolio that we can address because Air IT is providing business intelligence as a service, Cyber Security services including SOC, and because most of our subscribers’ customers are running Teams, we are also offering ‘Teams talk’ direct routing.
I think we’re really fortunate in our sector that, whilst people can’t work in their office place, they need to work remotely. That means their IT and voice communication services need to be absolutely bulletproof and that’s what we’re delivering to our customers. Making sure that when things do go wrong we react to it quickly so that they can still maintain their ability to service their customers.”
