Ireland’s Data Solutions expands into UK with £3.8m spend

Irish IT solutions provider Data Solutions is investing £3.8 million over the next three years by expanding into the UK with a new office in Theale, Reading. The distributor says it also plans to triple its business over the next three years to £60 million turnover on the back of the investment.

Data Solutions specialises in next generation data centres, security and unified communications. The company, which has achieved steady year-on-year growth over the past 25 years in the UK and Ireland, will hire 10 new staff in its Reading office by 2018 to coincide with the expansion.

It expects its UK operations to grow to the same size as its Irish business by then, targeting £30 million in revenues in Ireland in the same year.

To lead the UK expansion, the IT solutions distributor has appointed Sean Fane as UK managing director for the company. He brings more than 20 years’ sales and business experience in the UK, including an executive role at IQ-Sys, the UK distributor in the virtualisation market.

A “huge factor” in Data Solutions’ decision to create a UK presence comes from its new partnership with Nutanix. Data Solutions will work with Nutanix to empower the UK reseller community to maximise its sales of hyperconverged infrastructure to enterprise customers and optimise wallet-share in its customer-base.

Speaking about the announcement, Sean Fane, UK managing director, Data Solutions, said: “I’m very excited to join the team at Data Solutions and head up the UK business. We will bring the engagement philosophy of partnership and the strong value proposition from our long-established Irish parent company to the UK reseller community.”

He said: “Our core value is passion for partner growth, and we are dedicated to creating profitable, incremental sales for our resellers through pro-active teamwork and ‘hands-on’ business development activities, training and support.

“Our ‘back-office’ team has a depth of sales and marketing skills and experience, and has a track-record of achieving results for emerging technology companies. We are ideally positioned to enable UK resellers to become successful in this exciting new technology space.”

Andrew Brewerton, channel manager, Nutanix, said: “We are committed to establishing strong relationships with our distributors and partners to deliver the best experience for customers. With its strong channel and remarkable ability to bring new technologies to market, Data Solutions has given us access to top-tier resellers in Ireland, which has been instrumental to our own growth in the region.”

He added: “We see a lot of opportunities in delivering invisible infrastructure, where computers, storage and virtualisation can be converged at any scale. We look forward to seeing the success with Data Solutions replicated across the UK.”

As well as Nutanix, Data Solutions has also signed deals with CommVault, Arista and Supermicro in Ireland.

@AntonySavvas