IT Lab the MSP behind McLaren F1 sports cars, has bought Sol-Tec, one of Microsoft’s largest Azure partners in the UK. The details of the transaction have not been disclosed.
Peter Sweetbaum (pictured), CEO of IT Lab, who presented on MSP acquisition strategy at last year’s MSP Summits in London and Manchester says, “Sol-Tec is a true Azure expert, with market leading expertise in the design, deployment and configuration of secure and compliant Azure environments. We are incredibly excited to add Sol-Tec’s award-winning Azure expertise to our market leading Modern Workplace and Dynamic 365 practices, further solidifying IT Lab as one of the UK’s leading Microsoft focused cloud services and solutions providers.”
Following its recent acquisitions of SMB specialist, Mirus in 2019 and leading Microsoft Office365 and SharePoint partner, Content and Code in September 2018, the turnover for the combined IT Lab group is now around £85m, with strong organic growth continuing. Achieving yet another milestone on its way to becoming the most awarded and capable Microsoft partner in the UK, IT Lab is one of the very few partners able to provide services to its clients across all three elements of Microsoft’s Cloud, Office 365 and Modern Workplace; Azure and Dynamics 365.
Peter Sweetbaum adds: “Having the ability to deliver the functionality that Microsoft cloud centric services can provide, particularly at this pivotal and challenging time is key for our clients.”
Sol-Tec has completed prestige projects including the transition of public sector giants including the Department of Work and Pensions; HMRC; and Department for Education and other leading public and private sector organisations.
Supporting a top three UK supermarket chain and a top five online financial services business to leverage the power of Microsoft Azure, Sol-Tec paves the way to Azure adoption using a combination of its deep Azure expertise and its own Velocity Landing Zone. Velocity Landing Zone is Sol-Tec’s, proprietary methodology for using pre-defined artefacts to expedite the deployment and configuration of highly scalable and secure baseline Azure environments.
This is the fourth acquisition since private equity firm ECI Partners acquired a majority stake in IT Lab in 2016. ECI typically invests in growth businesses valued up to £200m.
Nik Topham, founder of Sol-Tec will continue to focus on the commercial growth of Sol-Tec as well as the ongoing integration between the two businesses, while working with Tim Wallis, IT Lab Group Chief Digital Officer to further build on the group’s close relationship with Microsoft.
Paul Collins, CTO of Sol-Tec will oversee the continued technical development of the group’s Azure practice, working alongside Nick Isherwood, IT Lab’s Product & Service Director for Azure to infuse Sol-Tec’s capability and the Velocity Landing Zone into the wider IT Lab group.
- Peter Sweetbaum will be presenting on acquisitions again at the European Managed Services Summit in Amsterdam on 28 May 2020 details here:
