Houlihan Lokey Advises Livingstone Group on its Sale to Trustmarque

Houlihan Lokey is pleased to announce that Livingstone Group, a portfolio company of Carlyle, has been acquired by Trustmarque, a portfolio company of One Equity Partners. Houlihan Lokey acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Livingstone and Carlyle.

Livingstone is a leading independent, global provider of Software Asset Management (SAM) and FinOps services. The company is trusted by some of the world’s largest companies and public sector organiations to control and optimise their investments in software and cloud services. Its independent expertise and technology-enabled managed services deliver successful outcomes across the entire investment lifecycle, accurately forecasting demand, mitigating compliance risks, negotiating contracts, and managing and optimising consumption. With approximately 150 experts and its sophisticated digital intelligence platform, Livingstone is uniquely positioned as the only independent SAM services provider recognised as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

Trustmarque delivers integrated services that support UK organisations through every step of the IT investment process. For Trustmarque, this transaction is the first step in an ambitious growth strategy to accelerate the consolidation of middle-market IT services in the UK and accelerates Trustmarque’s strategic focus on optimisation and cloud services, bringing the management of the whole software lifecycle to its customers. The partnership with Livingstone complements and strengthens Trustmarque’s existing capabilities in SAM, cloud, and licensing, offering superior returns on technology investment for its blue-chip customer base.

“Everyone at Livingstone is excited to join the growing Trustmarque family,” added Chris Allan, CEO of Livingstone. “Our combined expertise will create unrivalled end-to-end services across the software lifecycle for our customers. In Trustmarque, we recognised a partner with the same vision as ours: a commitment to ensuring our customers buy what they need, secure their environment, and renew it optimally. We look forward to working together to help all our customers harness the power of technology through smart IT investments.”

“Today marks an exciting milestone, as we welcome the Livingstone team to Trustmarque,” said Ben Richardson, CEO of Trustmarque. “This acquisition will enable us to leverage the data-driven knowledge of Livingstone to benefit Trustmarque’s customers. Together, we are ready to collaborate to deliver superior transparency and control over our customers’ IT investments.”

Trustmarque Chairman, Torgrim Takle, commented that “Today we embark on an extraordinary growth opportunity, becoming stronger and more adaptable through all the synergies with Livingstone. I'm confident that our strengthened combined capabilities will further support the cloud and digitalisation agenda of our key technology partners, particularly Microsoft and Cisco, while delivering an enhanced value proposition to all our collective customers.”