Beech Tree Private Equity backed Wavenet announces the acquisition of Solar Communications, a leading unified communications player, as part of its ongoing buy and build strategy.

Beech Tree Private Equity, the specialist buy and build investor in high-growth sectors, today announces that its investee company Wavenet has acquired Solar Communications. Terms of the deal are not disclosed. Beech Tree Private Equity recently announced a re-financing of Wavenet with a new £75 million debt facility from Ares Management and RBS to continue its buy and build.

This acquisition will significantly strengthen the Wavenet Group's market share in the UC marketplace and cement its place as one of the leading managed service providers to businesses in the UK for fully converged data, voice, cloud, security and mobile. Both businesses have been extremely active and successful in their 'buy and build' strategy, each acquiring 4 businesses and integrating them over the past 2 years, whilst maintaining organic growth.

The combination of the businesses brings the benefits of scale, broader geographic reach, a stronger management team and significant enhancements to the portfolio of services and solutions the group can now offer its customers. Wavenet has its own automated platform on which it offers multiple cloud-based communication services to direct customers and resellers. It has a leading position in Cisco's BroadCloud solutions, underpinned by a broad range of connectivity, security, cloud voice and data solutions which it supplies on its own network.

Solar brings significant on-premise engineering skills to the group, and has market leading accreditations in SD WAN, and UC services which it supplies directly to SME and mid-market businesses across the UK, together the group will now service nearly 10,000 UK business customers.

Paul Franks, Managing Partner of Beech Tree Private Equity and director of Wavenet commented "Solar Communications is a significant acquisition for Wavenet. We have already completed 4 bolt-on acquisitions since our original investment in 2016 with the business more than double the size. The acquisition of Solar moves the game on demonstrably, both in terms of scale and adding more capability to the unified communications offering. We have significant firepower with the new debt facilities to continue acquiring complementary businesses in the sector and we are actively looking for further bolt-on acquisitions".