Maintel sells MPS unit to CCS Group

Cloud and managed services player Maintel has signed an agreement with Corona Corporate Group (CCS) to sell its managed print services business unit.

The sale, which came into effect at the end of last month, is worth £4.5m and fits in with Maintel’s strategy of focusing the business around a core cloud managed services player.

Maintel CEO Ioan MacRae said: “I would like to thank our former Maintel Managed Print Services colleagues for their commitment to Maintel and our customers, and for their hard work in ensuring that this transaction could complete successfully. On behalf of the board, we wish them well for their future with CCS.”

MacRae has been at the helm of Maintel for 18 months, having joined in the autumn of 2019 from Avaya, and has been making changes to the business. He has overseen a reduction in costs, a reorganisation of the senior leadership team, has focused on a vertical sales approach and on bolstering its customer satisfaction levels.

For CCS, the acquisition brings not only the staff but a customer base that is around 700-strong with 2,000 machines in field. It will also hand the firm more geographical coverage and should give the business more growth opportunities.

Andy Moffitt, CEO at CCS, said the firm was looking for more growth as the world started to return to a more normal footing. “This is a really exciting addition to the CCS family and our first as we emerge from the Covid crisis,” he said.

“We are also opening a new Blackburn office to support this new business and establish a hub in the North West.”

There has been some debate about what the “new normal” will look like for managed print services specialists and recent research from industry watcher Quocirca indicated that there are growing demands for the channel to widen the support it can offer customers.

The analyst house found that those that could deliver MPS were still facing demand as society starts to unlock over the next few months, with 53% of business leaders expecting spending on MPS to increase over the next year. But it was also clear that customers are also looking for partners that can deliver workplace services, cloud print services and sustainability services.

Quocirca director Louella Fernandes said back in March: “Hybrid working is here to stay, and MPS providers must position themselves to assist clients with home printing and information security, but also a wider range of complementary workplace services that help implement the accelerated digital transformation prompted by the pandemic and aid home-office collaboration in the hybrid environment.”