Some more M&A news today, this time from the distributor world. Arrow Electronics today announced its intentions to acquire value added distributor Computerlinks, a Munich Germany based company. The purchase price is estimated to be around $300 million.
“This acquisition supports our strategy to serve the data center of the future and strengthens our position in this rapidly growing segment. We are excited to welcome the Computerlinks team to Arrow,” said Michael J. Long, chairman, president and CEO of Arrow.
Arrow has been focusing a lot on cloud computing following the launch of their ArrowSphere initiative, earlier in the year. Computerlinks, which has operations in Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia and is projected to generate revenues of approximately $950 million for 2013, has a focus on IT security related products.
While there hasn’t been a lot of M&A activity within the distributor world, distributors are becoming more visible within the managed services community, particularly when it comes to equipping MSPs and cloud providers with hardware and software necessary for private cloud computing. It will be interesting to see how Arrow integrates Computerlinks and whether it has any hopes for using them to promote Arrow’s cloud services ambitions.
Arrow will also be sponsoring the upcoming MSPWorld Fall conference.