20 01732 759725 Cultural fit Weber says he looks for three main things in an acquisition target: profitability, portfolio fit, and cultural fit. “We don’t choose to buy a company just because it is good value, we want to build a strong portfolio for our partners, and we also require a good cultural fit – people who think like us and most of all have the same approach to value-added distribution. Giving value-add, not just saying they do.” As examples of where Elovade provides ‘value-add’ for partners, Weber cites everything from sales and marketing enablement and installation services for smaller partners with limited in-house resources to expert support provided by a team of 15 highly knowledgeable technicians – a key differentiator since EBERTLANG was founded in 1995. Elovade, which has built its business supporting high volumes of small tickets with a high gross margin, sees the partner experience, especially for its many smaller resellers and MSP partners, as a clear advantage over larger distributors that may be more interested in big projects. According to Shaw, this aligns very well with Brigantia’s ethos. “When we launched Brigantia in 2016, our focus was all about how to work best with the SMB MSP world. Smaller MSPs were telling me they were getting no attention from the big distributors and wanted to work with someone who genuinely cared about their business. Because Elovade has historically been reliant on lots of small MSPs, rather than big project work, we’re very aligned in how we want to work.” He adds that today, it is not just the big distributors that are unable to match the level of knowledge and support Brigantia provides, but also new competitors like cloud marketplaces. “The new world of marketplaces has a struggle with pre-sales and adding value upfront, beyond the marketplace experience. They excel in the automated aspects, including billing and the back end. For a very self-sufficient MSP that knows a product inside and out, it makes sense for conjunction with its founders and another private investor before selling it to US software company Carbonite in 2014. Weber stayed on after the acquisition, becoming part of Carbonite’s executive team in Boston and helping to build out the company’s operations in EMEA, only leaving when Carbonite itself was taken over by Opentext in December 2019. “That’s when the founders of EBERTLANG, as they were then, now Elovade, approached me and said they had sold the company to a private equity investor and needed a successor to take the business forward.” Weber was the obvious choice, known not only to EBERTLANG, which had been MailStore’s German distributor since 2010, but also to HQ Equita (now NEXX Capital) a private equity investor in the company (joined by Verdane in early 2024) that was looking for someone to execute an ambitious buy and build strategy. “They hired me with a clear focus on building out EBERTLANG and turning what was then a pure German company into a pan-European one, and that’s pretty much what we’ve been doing since I joined in 2021.” Acquisitions to date include German IT cybersecurity distributor 8Soft in 2021, Italian MSP distributor Achab and Swedish VAD Innosoft in 2022, Swedish distributor Inuit AB in 2024, and, so far this year, Italian security distributor Avangate and UK cybersecurity distributor Brigantia. Last year, EBERTLANG reinforced its growing international character by changing its name to Elovade (the letters ‘El’ from its original name, VAD from the nature of its business, plus a couple of vowels to create a homophone for ‘elevate’, highlighting its value to MSP and vendor partners). When Weber joined the company, EBERTLANG was a very profitable, purely German business with 40 employees and 30 million euros in revenue. Today, the Elovade Group has well over 100 million euros in revenue, with half of this generated outside the DACH region, 240 employees, and 15,000 active partners across Europe. At the end of April, cybersecurity distributor Brigantia Partners announced it had been acquired by pan-European, value-add software distributor Elovade Group, formerly EBERTLANG. Elovade’s eighth acquisition to date, and its first in the UK, builds on the company’s existing operations in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), the Nordics, and Italy. It turns out that while Elovade Group is new to the UK, CEO Philip Weber is no stranger to these shores, having spent three and a half years studying business in London at the turn of the millennium before setting up his own firm to help technology start-ups with financing and business advice. One of these businesses was MailStore, a German email archiving company, which Weber invested in and developed in Who is Elovade, and what does its acquisition of Brigantia mean for the cybersecurity distributor’s partners in the UK & Ireland? Technology Reseller finds out more from Elovade Managing Director Philip Weber and the pan-European distributor’s new MD for the UK & Ireland, Angus Shaw. Business as usual M&A ...continued Angus Shaw
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