TECHNOLOGY group Onyx plans to spend its entire £15m war chest this year as it prepares for another year of growth that it hopes will push profits up by 50%.

After a management-led buy-out in October which saw the Stockton firm taken over by London investors Isis Equity for £27m, Onyx was given money to continue its acquisition spree.

It now operates from 10 sites including Newcastle, Teesside, London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Sheffield, and has five data centres and six workplace recovery facilities.

The business has bought six businesses in the last couple of years and now has 120 staff and more than 2,000 customers nationwide.

Chief executive Neil Stephenson said he hopes to spend its £15m fund this year on companies in the data storage and cloud computing sectors.

“We are ready to make some larger acquisitions.

“The world is moving into data centres and cloud, the data is moving out of the office and into the cloud or outside centres, and that plays right into our hands.”

Onyx is preparing to spend £2m in its newest data centre, which stores information for companies, in Sheffield, and says that will be up and running within two months.