Computacenter plc is a British IT services group headquartered in Hatfield, north of London. With a presence notably in the United Kingdom, Germany, France and North America, it works on the digital infrastructure of large organizations. Its positioning combines technology supply, consulting, integration and managed services. In the cloud sector, Computacenter does not present itself as a global platform provider comparable to the hyperscalers: it helps its clients select, deploy and administer environments suited to their constraints.
A history rooted in enterprise IT
Founded in 1981 by Peter Ogden and Philip Hulme, Computacenter grew around supplying IT equipment to businesses. The group gradually expanded into services as fleets of workstations, networks and data centers became more complex to manage. Its listing on the London Stock Exchange in 1998 marked an important milestone in this journey.
Its international expansion combines organic growth and acquisitions. The acquisition of FusionStorm in 2018, followed by Pivot Technology Solutions in 2020, notably strengthened its North American presence. This geographic coverage enables it to support international clients while retaining local teams and service delivery capabilities. The group thus remains committed to an approach to enterprise IT in which operational proximity matters as much as access to technology catalogs.
Connecting equipment, cloud and operations
Computacenter’s model rests on several complementary activities. The supply of products and software meets infrastructure equipment and renewal needs. Professional services include technical consulting, architecture design and project implementation. Managed services then handle user support and the operation of IT environments, depending on the contracts.
Cloud is part of this broader offering rather than a standalone service. Computacenter supports hybrid architectures, which combine on-premises resources with public cloud services, as well as environments that use multiple providers. Its work also covers digital workplaces, networks, data centers and cybersecurity. This approach aims to ensure consistency between infrastructure choices, security requirements and day-to-day use. It is particularly suited to organizations that cannot move all their applications to a single model.
What next?
For Computacenter, future opportunities lie as much in the ongoing modernization of existing systems as in the adoption of new platforms. Artificial intelligence projects bring additional requirements for computing, storage, networking and data governance. Meanwhile, cloud cost control, resilience and data location constraints make architectural trade-offs increasingly important. The challenge will be to turn this complexity into useful, recurring services in a market where integrators, operators and cloud providers compete for some of the same budgets.