Advania acquires Servium as tech spending rises to top of UK IT buyers’ agenda

12 June- LONDON Advania, an award-winning Microsoft partner, today announced its acquisition of Servium, a UK-based progressive value-added IT Solution Provider operating across the UK. This acquisition allows Advania to offer an even broader range of services, software and hardware procurement and strengthens relationships with leading manufacturers and distributors. The customers will continue to benefit from our comprehensive end-to-end service, further supporting the digital transformation agenda.


Commenting on the deal, Geoff Kneen, CEO of Advania UK, said “It is exciting to welcome the Servium team to Advania. Servium is a company with a long-standing heritage and an excellent reputation for helping customers succeed in achieving value for money when procuring technology and services. The combination of Advania and Servium will allow us both to deliver greater breadth of service and increased value to our clients. The cultural alignment of focusing on clients first and providing a great place to work for talented and ambitious people was clear from the start of our conversations and we are looking forward to what we can achieve together.


Advania customers will be enabled to optimise their IT spend across services, software and hardware using systems and processes which drove Servium’s Net Promoter Score to industry-leading levels, with 80% describing themselves as ‘Extremely Satisfied’.


Paul Barlow, CEO of Servium added "We are delighted to unite with Advania, who equally share our passion and commitment to service excellence. Together, we are now able to offer an enhanced range of solutions that touch every part of the modern IT landscape, responding to our customers’ needs to create business value through innovation, increase efficiencies and harness new ways to consume technology.”


Perfectly formed for responsiveness

Small and Medium Enterprises make up fully 99.9% of UK employers. The recent Advania Mid-market challenges report illustrated just how poorly served many among this backbone of British industry are with cost, complexity and cybersecurity their major concerns.


92% of mid-market IT buyers claim that Big Tech vendors don’t act in their best interest. Advania’s offerings are tailored to address the need for specific and custom solutions. With this acquisition Advania will be able to further address these concerns across a broader portfolio of technology vendors. Leveraging the experience Servium has in serving clients at the larger end of this segment, Advania can deliver robust end-to-end solutions that meet the exact needs of the business to optimise costs, improve security, and drive innovation.


IT Spend Management was a major issue with 32% of SME survey respondents describing licensing fees as inflated and 29% bemoaning the lack of customisable pricing options. However, despite mid-market organisations knowing where they are overspending, they don’t know how to make meaningful changes to IT spend. Asked how they spend their IT budget today vs in an ideal world, they would change almost nothing.

Meanwhile the complexity of systems means Technical Debt mounts up with 33% of UK SMEs admitting they regularly overspend on legacy systems rather than updating them. This behaviour compromises Cybersecurity with 55% of mid-market businesses admitting they failed to patch their systems regularly - a shortcoming that increases business risk substantially.


With the addition of Servium, Advania can now provide the UK mid-market the same level of sophisticated procurement options as the largest enterprises have access to, allowing those clients to focus on transforming their core digital business processes with a single service partner with a passion for client affinity.