Storage giant EMC has announced an offer to acquire UK consultancy firm Conchango for £42m.

The Conchango board has unanimously recommended the offer to shareholders and the transaction is expected to close in April.

EMC claims the acquisition will enhance EMC's ability to provide technology consulting services to UK and European customers, although it did not mention details of how this would impact on its existing channel partners.

Howard Elias, president of EMC global services said: "The addition of Conchango will mark another key milestone in the evolution of EMC’s rapidly growing consulting services organisation, significantly expanding our global capabilities to design, build and deliver tightly integrated solutions for our customers’ most critical business applications.

"Conchango and its talented employees have a proven track record of delivering many of the UK's largest data integration projects using highly scalable tools and methodologies. By combining Conchango with our own well-established Microsoft consultancy practice, we will be well-positioned to further expand our joint capabilities to more customers and establish a strong foundation for a growing consultancy practice in the UK and throughout Europe.”

Mik Altendorf, joint managing director and founder of Conchango, said: " Conchango has had a tremendous few years, where we have seen the return on our strategy of helping enterprise clients in our target sectors make the most of the rapidly evolving technology landscape.

"By helping our clients to be successful we have grown our business to be one of the leaders in the UK and the next stage in our strategy is to expand upon this success in new markets. We are thrilled to become part of EMC which gives us the platform for expansion throughout Europe and also access to the expertise and wider resources of the global EMC team. We look forward to this next exciting stage in our development and the benefits we believe it will bring to our clients, our employees and our business partners.”