In April 2025, we announced Brigantia’s acquisition by pan-European distributor Elovade Group. Read the official press release here.

Since the announcement, our MD Angus Shaw and Elovade’s CEO, Philip Weber sat down with Technology Reseller Magazine to discuss the acquisition.

The Q&A interview uncovers Philip’s history with Elovade, the company’s journey into the UK and why Brigantia and Elovade align with each other so well. The interview piece also highlights future ambitions and vendor opportunities for the UK market.

Business as usual

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.

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 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.

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 them to utilise the marketplace for hyper-automation, billing integration and all that.

But they get very little or no support around the products themselves, how they work, how to sell and market them, and what to do when something doesn't quite work as planned."

The ability to support partners effectively - and enable vendors to expand into new regions - is clearly dependent on a distributor's knowledge of local market conditions, and, in building out a pan-European business, Weber has always sought to maintain that local expertise, including the services of the existing Managing Directors of the companies he acquires.

"Keeping knowledge management in the region is super-important because every region is different, requirements are different, and go-to-market is different. That local touch has to remain," he says. In that respect, his approach is very much focused on continuity, which is one of the aspects of the acquisition Shaw is keen to emphasise.

"Yes, Elovade is a group business, and yes, it is a European business and wants to exercise the benefits that come from being so, but it also understands the value of local expertise. It's not saying it knows what's best for the UK, and I'm not saying I know what's best for other regions. Its approach is to bring together the strengths of both businesses and give local leaders freedom to act."

UK ambitions

Weber says he had always planned to enter the UK market but had not found the right acquisition target until he came across Brigantia in early 2024. He contacted Angus and Martin (Wright, former Chairman) over LinkedIn, and it soon became clear that the two businesses were culturally aligned and had much to offer each other.

Shaw points out that even though its board members were in their sixties, Brigantia was in no hurry to sell; there was no need to do so.

"It is a very strong, growing business, and it's possible we wouldn't have sold to anyone else, but from the first meeting, Elovade felt right, and as we went through the process, it became very clear that we are a good fit. We are aligned on who our customers are, who our partners are and how our teams communicate with each other. That was important. If it had been a UK player, it might have been very different, but the fact that we're the first Elovade company in the UK and Ireland is a really interesting development for the team to be a part of.

"For me personally, as one of the remaining family members in what was a family business, it is very exciting to be part of something bigger. Brigantia would have grown at a similar rate, year after year, unless I was able to persuade Martin and lain (Shaw, Founder) to invest millions to accelerate its growth. Being part of the Elovade Group allows us to invest further and challenge ourselves to go faster and be even better," he says.

Weber points out that from a Group perspective, acquisitions generate growth in several ways.

"One is by adding companies, adding regions, filling white spots on the map where we want to be present. The other is through PMI, post-merger integration. You can add many single entities in different countries, but at some point, if you want to leverage the synergies within the group, you will need to have a single leading system in terms of ERP, CRM, marketing automation etc .. That's what we're building at the moment, a harmonised technical infrastructure that we will roll out across the group."

He adds that Elovade is also developing a new cloud services platform for partners, customising an out-of-the-box solution to meet their unique requirements.

"We don't want to become just a cloud distributor. However, we must be competitive with them in terms of technology, as that is one area where they excel. As a value-added distributor, we must evolve because cloud marketplaces are becoming increasingly prevalent. That said, with our portfolio of products, vendors and services, as well as our service differential, we have a good opportunity to compete with them using our platform.

"A larger MSP can use numerous cloud platforms, as long as they have a good integration into their PSA. We are building our platform to have those integrations. Then it doesn't matter if you have 1, 2,3 or more platforms delivering your products, as long as it's automated, the billing goes out of your own system and all the data gets delivered straight through an API into your system."

Additional vendors

Being part of a Group also allows Brigantia and Elovade to take on additional vendors.

"When making acquisitions, we like to see a certain overlap of vendors, because that shows us we are already working in the same direction," explains Weber. "A big focus of ours is prevention in cybersecurity, where we have at least one vendor in common, Hornetsecurity. We are also interested in vendors of Brigantia's that we can add to the group, for instance Heimdal, KnowBe4 and CyberSmart."

For Shaw, Elovade's wider portfolio, including its EL-branded cloud storage service, offers ample scope for Brigantia to add new vendors in areas outside its core cybersecurity specialism, such as IT infrastructure, email archiving, business continuity, storage, compliance, and MSP tools like PSAs and RMMs.

"RMMs and PSAs are something we could do that we don't do now, which also shows the benefits of being part of a Group. We would probably not launch the bigger names in this space in the UK, even if they let us, because every MSP in the country is familiar with them and either works with them or doesn't. We can't really add any value there, but we can with some of the up-and-coming challenger vendors that will be entering the market. That fits in with what we've done in the past and also takes account of the UK market," he says.

"Another option might be to take the MailStore archiving business. Email archiving is widely used in Germany, but in the UK it is primarily employed in regulated businesses. With the rise of DORA and other rules coming in like CAF, it's going to be something we will have to look at."

"We don't have to roll out all vendors in all regions," adds Weber. "That's not what we are after. It's picking the right vendors for the right regions on a country- by-country basis."

In other words, business as usual.

This interview is from Technology Reseller magazine v83. To access the full 4-page feature and magazine, click here.