Sir Peter Ogden and Sir Philip Hulme co-founded Computacenter at the exact right time. In 1981, IBM launched its first personal computer and, suddenly, the PC revolution was about to reach UK offices. Yet businesses had no idea how to buy, set up, or support them at scale. Enter Computacenter, one of the UK’s first, and now most enduring, technology sourcing companies.

It’s not all luck, of course. As two physics and engineering graduates, Ogden’s and Hulme’s combined technical, analytical and commercial expertise has helped Computacenter to emerge strongest from a crowded market. It expanded rapidly through the 1980s and 1990s, becoming the trusted IT partner to major corporate and public-sector clients across the UK and Europe.

The company floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1998 and has since grown into a multinational with thousands of employees worldwide. The journey hasn't been without its tests — a tough patch in the mid-2000s saw Ogden and Hulme explore taking the company private again.

Computacenter emerged from that period stronger. Over four decades in, it joined the FTSE100 for the first time in June 2026, having received a natural boost from another technology boom: the surge in demand for AI infrastructure. Its product order backlog hit £9.3bn in H1 2026, up 323 per cent year-on-year, while adjusted pre-tax profit rose by 87 per cent to £152.4m driven largely by the US.

Ogden and Hulme have each been knighted for their philanthropic efforts. Hulme founded The Hadley Trust to support disadvantaged youth in 1997. Two years later, Ogden established The Ogden Trust to promote science education. Both have since stepped back from executive roles, but the right-place-right-time instinct they built into Computacenter's DNA is still paying off, four decades on.