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MITSG snaps up CSS Group
Managed services player makes its first acquisition of the year building on expansion moves made in 2021
The first couple of weeks of 2022 have followed the pattern of the past couple of years, with a wave of consolidation being driven by firms keen to add more depth to their operations.
The latest to join a growing list of examples is Managed IT Services Group (MITSG), which has picked up fellow managed service provider (MSP) CSS Group for an undisclosed sum.
The deal with CSS Group includes Charles Street Solutions, MICL and Opus UK, which focuses on the specialising in IT services to the legal and professional services sectors. This is the largest deal the firm has made so far, taking the headcount of the business to the 70 mark, with the ability to reach customers across the UK.
MITSG is no stranger to making deals to grow the business. It was active last year, picking up Manchester-based provider of cloud services to the legal sector IT Farm in May, followed by a move for carrier contact centre specialist Nexbridge Communications.
A mixture of director and private investment has helped MITSG fuel its expansion strategy, with the business being headed by former GCI executive team of Mark Allen and Phil Smith, with GCI’s former CEO Adrian Thirkill serving as non-executive chairman.
“The acquisition of CSS is the ideal time to ‘announce ourselves’ as a new player in the UK managed services space and gives us the scale needed to aggressively target the UK small and medium business market,” said Mark Allen, chief financial officer and co-founder of MITSG.
“We believe SMEs in the UK, are currently poorly served, with providers that are either too small to offer the full compliment of IT services, or too big to care. Many of the former are ‘generalists’, meaning they have a broad portfolio of tenuously related services which lack the credibility of a genuine technology specialist,” he added.
Phil Smith, chief opperating officer and co-founder of MITSG, added that it had a clearly defined approach that it was taking out to SME customers.
“MITSG has been established to offer SMEs the full range of managed services across four distinct specialist units – cloud and remote desktop, networks and security, voice and contact centre, and IT managed services,” he said.
“Each of these units are staffed by experts in their given areas. There will be further acquisitions by the group throughout 2022 to allow us to create depth and balance in our product and service portfolio,” Smith added.
