Telecoms, data and cloud services firm Solar Communications, which has grown rapidly through a string of acquisitions, has itself been taken over.
Since its launch 30 year ago, Chippenham-based Solar has evolved from a business telecoms system reseller into a major specialist in cloud unified communications (UC).
It employs around 100 people at its bases in Chippenham, Cardiff, Harlow and Manchester directly supplying small and mid-market businesses across the UK.
Having made four acquisitions over the past two years – as well as growing organically – it has now been snapped up by Solihull-based Wavenet, a leading UK supplier of business telecoms backed by Beech Tree Private Equity.
Wavenet said the move would significantly strengthen its market share in UC and cement its place as one of the leading managed service providers to businesses in the UK for fully converged data, voice, cloud, security and mobile. Financial details of the deal have not been made public.
The combined business, which will now service nearly 10,000 UK business customers, brought benefits of scale, broader geographic reach, a stronger management team and significant portfolio enhancements, said Wavenet.
Like Solar, Wavenet has also pursued a successful ‘buy-and-build’ strategy, also acquiring four businesses and integrating them over the past two years while maintaining organic growth.
Wavenet has its own automated platform on which it offers multiple cloud-based communication services to direct customers and resellers. It has a leading position in Cisco’s BroadCloud solutions, underpinned by a broad range of connectivity, security, cloud, voice and data solutions which it supplies on its own managed network.
Wavenet CEO Bill Dawson said: “Solar is an extremely capable and exciting business with a very talented team. Its combination with Wavenet will provide added depth to the innovative and business enhancing services provided to both sets of customers.
“Solar has been successful developing the platform, people and services required for growing the business both organically and by acquisition. This has accelerated its transition from being a leading telephone system reseller in the UK, into becoming a fully managed cloud service provider, able to provide superlative technology and a fully managed service.”
Solar CEO John Whitty will join Wavenet’s executive board with a key role leading the integration of the businesses.
He said: “Following an intensive 30 months of growing our business into a successful and agile organisation, the time is right to take the next step and allow our customers to benefit from our significant joint capability and experience in the UC market.
“We are all very pleased that the Wavenet values and culture are extremely close to those already present within Solar which should make the integration of the businesses so much easier.
“The introduction of Wavenet’s award-winning network, Cisco and extensive networking expertise into our base, will improve our converged solutions and their automated platform will bring benefits to delivering our services to our customers.”
Solar is a Platinum partner of Mitel, a Microsoft Silver partner as well as a summit partner of Silver Peak. It has been recognised by the Sunday Times Tech Track 100, Deloitte’s Technology Fast500, the London Stock Exchange’s 1000 Companies to Inspire Britain for two consecutive years and has also been listed as a Sunday Times Best Companies to Work For ‘one to watch’ organisation for three consecutive years.
