An exciting new chapter begins for Elovade Group, with Brigantia by Elovade now officially Elovade UK&I
For over 30 years, the Elovade Group has built a reputation as one of Europe’s leading value-added software distributors for IT professionals.
A little over a year ago, it extended its European footprint further, entering the UK and Ireland through its acquisition of Yorkshire-based cybersecurity distributor Brigantia.
The move has brought benefits for both parties. For Elovade, the acquisition added greater geographical reach and access to new vendors. For Brigantia, becoming part of the pan-European group has opened up new opportunities backed by more resources and ambitious plans.
It was Elovade’s eighth acquisition and the start of a new chapter for Brigantia. Initially, Brigantia changed its name to Brigantia by Elovade with the expectation that it would drop ‘Brigantia by’ once the two organisations had been integrated under a group management structure. That time has now come.
What it means for partners
The re-branding of Brigantia as Elovade UK&I marks the beginning of a new era for the business founded 30 years ago as a buying group for computer dealers and IT support companies. But what does it mean for partners?
Not a great deal, initially, says Elovade UK&I Managing Director Angus Shaw. “Partners will have to get used to a different brand, but in practical terms the change of name won’t mean a huge amount. Partners won’t see a new account manager or anything like that. It really is just a change of name. That said, over the next 12 months they will see more services and hopefully more expertise and more reasons to work with the wider group.”
Planned developments for 2027 that will clearly have benefits for partners include the launch of a cloud marketplace in the UK and other regions, giving partners a more seamless way of interacting with Elovade and its vendors; the launch of a training academy; expansion into professional services, building on Elovade’s existing professional services business in Germany; and more collaboration between regions.
“We already have regular European- wide team meetings where we can get to know each other and learn what works well in other regions. In the UK, we’re a strong sales organisation. The German business is a strong technical organisation. The Nordics do marketing well. We’re trying to lean on each other’s strengths,” explains Shaw.
He adds that partners will also benefit from vendor relationships across the wider group and Elovade’s scale which should translate into better commercial terms.
“In addition to my UK role, I’ve taken on a Group board position and am responsible for the whole group portfolio – the vendors we work with, why we work with them, the terms on which we work with them – essentially trying to leverage our European volume to make sure our partners get the best commercials and the best margin they can.
“This also involves sharing expertise across the group. For example, we have a £10 million-plus relationship with Heimdal in the UK and are now launching them in the Nordics. My team has been heavily involved in that. And we’ll be launching them into DACH in October as well.”
Expanded product offering
In turn, Shaw has brought two products from Elovade’s own-brand EL portfolio to the UK&I, EL Storage and EL Mail Archiving, and is planning to add more in the future. The results so far, he suggests, are very promising.
“I was a bit sceptical as to how much demand we would see for a mail archiving solution in the UK. Historically, demand for mail archiving has been very much in the professional services space where the likes of Mimecast have made a lot of money for a long time. But we’ve seen good interest in it already, so there is clearly space for a more SMB-friendly offering.”
In addition to the two EL-branded products, Elovade UK&I has signed IT operations platform SuperOps, an existing Elovade group vendor, and extended its UK&I partnership with IT monitoring brand Paessler to Germany, highlighting the benefits of Elovade’s greater reach to vendors.
The two-way exchange of products and expertise is not the only benefit of being part of a larger European group. As Shaw points out, Elovade’s European heritage is an added attraction at a time of growing interest in IT sovereignty.
“Elovade wants to be the pan- European VAD that partners want to work with and is positioning itself very much as the European offering: we’re owned by a European private equity house; we only trade in Europe; our infrastructure is in Europe; our people are in Europe; and, although we are becoming quite a big business now, north of €150 million, we still have local European teams.”
Importantly, this includes the ability to sign vendors that meet the needs of local customers. “It’s not all about European group vendors,” says Shaw. “We still have a strong focus on the UK and have recently launched a couple of (initially) UK-specific vendors. One is Supply Guard, a very young UK company focusing on supply chain risk. The other is an MSP-specific tool called HighGround, again UK-only for now, which gives MSPs visibility into the security posture of clients, highlighting opportunities to do more business. Although we have a focus on the group portfolio and making sure everyone’s selling the same vendors, in the right circumstances, in specific areas we will work with local providers as well.”
A record year
The benefits of this approach and being part of a wider organisation are already paying dividends. Brigantia had its best year yet in 2025, some of it as part of Elovade, and Shaw expects 2026 to be even better, with an approximate 30% increase in turnover.
This is only partly due to its acquisition on April 30th of Rochdale-based distributor Zen Software, which brought a complementary product offering to Elovade UK&I, plus around £1.5 million in turnover and new reseller partners, increasing the latter’s customer base to 2,300 trading partners.
“Zen’s five main vendors are MailStore, MDaemon, Backup Assist, usecure and Arista, three of which are very big in Germany, so they were a natural bolt-on for us, especially now that we’re owned by Elovade which has a longstanding relationship with MailStore,” explains Shaw. “Zen were MailStore’s exclusive distributor for the UK and Ireland and that has given us a host of new partners to bring into the wider Elovade UK&I community.”
Shaw adds that Elovade UK&I is also experiencing good organic growth powered by the strong performance of its three main cybersecurity vendors – Heimdal, Knowbe4 and Keeper – and growing interest in compliance, driven by awareness of supply chain risk and imminent new regulations like the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, which will bring many MSPs within its scope.
“We’ve seen really fast growth with Sendmarc in that DMARC space. That’s now a £1 million-plus vendor for us, which from a standing start is pretty good. Both CyberSmart and Adoptech, another good British company, are growing well and they will be big contributors to our final 2026 number.
“One of the reasons we signed Adoptech, which simplifies security compliance for MSPs and their customers, is because an MSP can look very bad, very quickly if it’s not got its own house in order with the tooling that’s now available. We’ve seen an uptick in that and greater focus on supply chain risk thanks in part to the work the NCSC has done encouraging partners to continue along the path from Cyber Essentials to Cyber Essentials Plus to ISO 27001. We’ve got many more partners doing CE Plus than before, and a lot of those CE Plus partners are now doing ISO 27001 to boost security and help them stand out from the crowd.”
AI and automation
Another area in which partners can expect to see significant activity next year is AI. All Shaw can say for the time being is that Elovade is exploring its approach to AI and automation, paying particular attention to how it can add value to channel partners that have generally struggled to monetise the technology and, in many cases, don’t even have the confidence in their own capabilities to have productive conversations with clients.
Whatever Elovade does introduce in the next 12 months, from cloud marketplaces and training academies to AI and automation and an ever- expanding cybersecurity offering, Shaw is confident that some things will stay the same.
“Since Elovade acquired us, they have done exactly what they said they wanted to do, which is basically to let a successful business continue to thrive, while supporting us with additional product and technical expertise. As Elovade UK&I, we will continue to benefit from the Group’s resources and investment in new platforms and technologies, while remaining a human-led organisation with extensive expertise and a product specialist structure.”
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