With revenues surging from £96 million to £452 million, Advania UK is consolidating operations and eyeing further growth across the UK and Ireland, driven by AI innovation and a mid-market focus.
Advania UK is emerging as one of the fastest-growing players in the country’s IT services market, having quadrupled its client base and dramatically increased turnover over the past year. According to filings and industry data, Advania UK’s annual revenue leapt from approximately £96 million in 2023 to £452 million in 2024, largely driven by the acquisitions of CCS Media and Servium.
Now, CEO Geoff Kneen says the company is entering a new phase bringing acquired teams under one brand, scaling its AI strategy, and setting the stage for further expansion in the UK and Ireland.
In an interview with IT Europa, Kneen confirmed that the integration of CCS Media and Servium into Advania UK has completed. “We always said the 4th of August was when we were going to become one organisation from a people, values and a brand perspective,” he said. “That’s what’s happening... we’re on track.”
The change includes a unified website, an upgrade in user technology, and the onboarding of all employees to Advania’s AI tools, including Microsoft Copilot and its in-house private GPT-based platform, ADA. “Everybody in Advania UK has Copilot. We’ve also got our private ChatGPT AI solution, which is called ADA. So all of the CCS and Servium folks get AI-enabled in terms of their reseller channel,” said Kneen.
Growth through capability—not cost-cutting
Advania’s UK transformation follows its acquisitions of CCS Media and Servium, moves that significantly boosted the company’s scale and reach. But Kneen was clear the strategy is not about synergies through cuts. “There’s nobody been let go through purpose of the acquisition,” he said. “Our whole acquisition standpoint is about adding adjacent capabilities to our clients… so fundamentally we’ve always had the philosophy that our acquisition strategy is about accelerating growth rather than a cost synergy basis.”
Instead, the integration has deepened Advania’s nationwide coverage. “We’ve just carved up the UK by geography and postcode and just said, look, we’ve now got teams that are covering every single part of the UK,” said Kneen. “What you had within CCS was much stronger coverage in Scotland, the north of England and London… what you got with Servium is more south of the M4 down to the coast.”
‘Consolidate and differentiate’
Kneen said the company is pausing further acquisitions for the rest of 2025, but M&A will resume next year with a twin-track strategy: “We will acquire — not this year but probably next year. And our whole approach is twofold going forward, which is consolidate and differentiate,” he said. “You’ll see us doing scale acquisitions… but also ones like [the AI Framework], which are about taking market share or differentiation.”
Despite Advania’s size, Kneen sees vast opportunity ahead. “The market in the UK is 150 billion pounds a year. And even with everything that we’re doing… we’re going to be about half a billion. So we are one-third of 1% of the market.”
While many large IT services firms chase enterprise contracts, Kneen says Advania’s strategy is staying firmly mid-market. “This is how we talk about it... our sweet spot is roughly a thousand users in a client, but we go 10 times bigger and we go 10 times smaller,” he explained. “Mid-market, low enterprise and SMB. We’re not abandoning that.”
He added: “We’re not going to turn around and say we’re abandoning that market and moving into enterprise… we’ve built our business to help ambitious organisations to succeed. So we want to be with people when they’re really going through growth, and we want to be empowering with growth.”
Monetising AI through real-world use cases
Kneen said Advania is already commercialising AI, even if it’s still a small share of revenue. “We are monetizing AI quite well… we’ve got a private ChatGPT solution. We’re doing a lot of Copilot rollouts… training a population to use a new capability—that’s really where the money is at the moment.”
Beyond productivity tools, Advania is also investing in specific “agents” to solve business problems. “One for example is… we’ve got an RFP agent that absolutely takes 50% of the work out of producing an RFP… you can drop the client’s documents into the backend, you can point it at all your templates, all the last bids… it will produce you a quote.”
Kneen added that Advania’s approach to AI development is deliberately inclusive. “We’re crowdsourcing it across everybody in the company. We’re not creating an ivory tower of the AI team… because we believe AI is a capability that everybody in our industry—probably in every industry—has to learn.”
Examples include internal productivity gains. “Our service delivery managers… previously might spend four or five days getting all the data together for a report for a client. Now it’s 20 minutes,” he said. “They can spend those four days analyzing that data to work out how they can improve things.”
Repositioning as a trusted tech partner
Kneen wants to move beyond industry labels. “We don’t worry about those boxes, in truth,” he said. “We’re the trusted technology partner for our clients. The ultimate thing for us is the client. Everything we do comes from the client.”
He said that perspective was shaped by his time as CIO at WS Atkins, one of the UK’s largest design and engineering firms. “I used to have 18,000 users and things, and so I’ve been through the client side of all of this,” he said. “The partner, vendor, supplier management part of the job was my least favourite because it was so hard and complicated… different terms with everybody, different SLAs, different rates, different skill sets… and they said they could do everything—they couldn’t.”
“That’s why we’ve taken this strategy,” he continued. “You couldn’t be a trusted technology partner for a global enterprise. Their needs are too big and complicated. But when you focus on the part of the market you want to become the trusted technology partner for, you can build that capability.”
With a newly unified business, ongoing AI innovation and plans for future expansion, Advania UK appears well-positioned to challenge traditional players—and reshape the mid-market IT landscape.
