PCM Accelerates European Push With $4M U.K. Solution Provider Buy

PCM has purchased a 21-person IT services firm delivering everything from cabling to cloud services to expand its footprint in the United Kingdom.

The El Segundo, Calif.-based company, No. 25 on the 2017 CRN Solution Provider 500, said its acquisition of Liverpool, U.K.-based The Stack Group will enhance its expertise and vendor accreditations around the hybrid cloud, networking, security, data management, and digital workplace segments.

"As a leading provider in North America, we continue to look for ways to accelerate market-share gains, and this acquisition will allow us to expand upon our offerings not only to new customers in the U.K. and European markets, but also to our global customers based in North America," Frank Khulusi, PCM's chairman and CEO, said in a statement.

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Terms of the deal, which was announced Monday, were not disclosed. Stack had sales of $3.92 million for the fiscal year ended March 31, and the deal is expected to have an immaterial effect on PCM's bottom line. PCM's stock is up $0.15 (1.15%) in trading Monday morning, and the company didn't immediately respond to requests for additional comment.

Buying The Stack Group will enable PCM to accelerate the growth of its managed services and multilingual global services desk within Europe, the company said. Additional services available include U.K.-based data center delivering cloud solutions, remote management and monitoring, managed collaboration and unified communications, outsourced help desk services, and project management.

"Our continued investment into the U.K. organization allows us to extend our existing service offerings within North America to our European-based clients," Donavan Hutchinson, managing director for U.K. and International. "I am excited to work with the team at The Stack Group given our strong cultural fit and motivation to integrate our product portfolios and offerings to mutual and net new clients."

The deal will also enable Stack to cross-sell its current offerings into PCM's client base, according to Steve Cobham, the company's managing director. Stack owns and operates two Tier II data centers in the U.K., ensuring no issues with governance or compliance for EU legislation and data control, according to the company's website.

PCM launched a United Kingdom and European practice at the start of May to raise the company's image and credibility in the eyes of global customers and give the company capabilities it didn't have previously, Khulusi said in April. The bulk of the expansion effort will focus on the U.K. since the regulatory environment, ease of transactions and level of the market is most similar to North America.

The company expected to spend $4 million launching its U.K. business in 2017, and expects the operation to be profitable by 2018. PCM faces competition in Europe from direct market reseller powerhouses CDW and Insight Enterprises, as well as locally based companies, Khulusi said in April.

Stack was founded in 1979, and became a Microsoft Gold Partner in 1999 and a Citrix Silver Partner in 2002, according to the company's website. The company was bought by hospitality software maker Agilysis in 2007 for $25.2 million, and launched a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offering in 2009, according to the company.

The company established data, interconnect and telecom divisions in 2013, and became the first provider of hyper-converged technology in England's 1.4 million-person Merseyside County in 2015. Stack today offers fully integrated Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service offerings to private sector customers built for both traditional and cloud-native workloads, the company said.

Stack also offers disaster recovery, cybersecurity, data storage, networking and cabling services to public sector clients to maximize performance and efficiency, the company said. And for education customers, Stack delivers cabling, Wi-Fi, data storage, cybersecurity and data backup solutions, the company said.

Stack is a Cisco Select partner, a Citrix partner, a Dell PartnerDirect Premier member and a certified partner for the Equallogic PS Series, a Fortinet Meru partner, a NetApp Gold partner, a Nutanix solution provider, a ShoreTel Authorized Champion partner, a Sophos partner, a Veeam Silver Pro Partner, a VMware enterprise solution provider and authorized training center, and a Zerto partner.