Terry O’Brien (pictured right), CEO of DWS, said, “I’ve admired the Giacom business for a number of years – a great channel-only business, obsessed about delivering great products and a great experience for partners through a great platform. We have so much in common in terms of focus, ways of working and values. Bringing together these two high growth businesses in unified comms and cloud services is a huge step forward in our plans to support an ever-converging ICT partner channel. I think this will be great for our combined 5,500 partners and I am really looking forward to working with Mike and his team at Giacom.”
Wardell added, “The more time we spent with the team from DWS, the more similarities we saw in our businesses and how we approach the channel. From our focus on customer experience to our business values to the integration approach we each adopt for our technology platforms, it was clear that the two businesses are a great fit.”
Founded in 1999, Giacom became a cloud marketplace and indirect cloud software provider four years ago, capitalising on an industry shift towards cloud-based solutions. It was recently announced as Business Insider’s Fastest Growing Business in Yorkshire, has been a Sunday Times Tech Track 100 company for four years in a row, and just passed the milestone of one million product licenses sold.
Giacom’s Cloud Market platform is the UK’s largest independent cloud portal. It was designed to make life easier for IT businesses who look after the IT needs of UK SMEs. Cloud Market delivers SaaS solutions, including Microsoft 365 and Azure, security and backup solutions to over 70,000 end-user SMEs through Giacom’s ITC clients.
Sellers Livingbridge, a mid-market private equity investor, first invested in Giacom in 2017. The principal advisors on this exit for Livingbridge included Alantra, Pinsent Masons, PwC and KPMG. The principal advisors for DWS were EY and Eversheds.