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After Solvares buys More-IQ, then merges with Totalmobile. UK housing DLO & contractor repair systems just got a lot more interesting. Two announcements in four days and neither is small.
Following on from consolidating FLS (Fast Lean Smart) recently, Solvares Group has acquired UK-based More-IQ, a true Cloud dynamic scheduling specialist that has been aiming straight at social housing landlords. Good on Nick, Katie and Gael on that one. 😉
Then Solvares and Totalmobile announced yet another merger, creating a combined group of 800+ people supporting 4,000+ customers, with housing explicitly called out as a key sector. This matters because scheduling these days is not a nice-to-have. In housing repairs, it is the control room. If the scheduler is average, everything downstream looks average too: customer comms, compliance visits, voids sequencing, multi-trade, right-first-time, and the “why did nobody turn up?” calls.
What does this mean in simple terms, a view from a seasoned sector Critical Friend ?
Solvares is stitching together optimisation and scheduling brains with a mainstream field service execution platform. More-IQ strengthens the cloud-native scheduling side, and Solvares explicitly positions it in their comms as boosting its offering for the housing sector and accelerating cloud-native innovation.
The Totalmobile merger statement is basically “planning through to execution”, at scale, with no immediate change promised to existing customers. Well, they all say that don’t they?
These platforms are winning some significant housing deals and often banging on about those wins. How some of those pan out to satisfactory go-lives might be somewhat shankier. I mean I see some of these in my projects.
Community Housing recently has selected Totalmobile’s platform to support repairs for 6,000+ homes, with 70 operatives, aiming for March 2026 go-live and projecting £750k+ net savings over five years. Hyde Housing has a published repairs contract with Totalmobile extending field-service and scheduling capability across wider operations. Wandle Housing Association awarded Totalmobile Connect, Mobilise and Analytics via G-Cloud. Raven Housing Trust and Vivid Homes are great More-IQ examples.
So what should DLO repairs managers and housing organisations do next? Maybe don’t panic. But also not sleepwalk into a new foreign-owned group making quiet changes while you are busy fighting damp, mould and backlog. After all, there are some great alternative indie choices out there too, such as ROCC who quietly seem to be just getting on with doing a good job with everything ‘in the SAAS box’.
Here is what I would get nailed down now, in writing, (with dates OBVs) :
Roadmap certainty: what gets invested in, what gets merged, and what gets nudged toward end-of-life over the next 24 months. The press line is “no immediate changes”, but “immediate” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there (like every merger or acquisition).
Commercial protection: what happens to pricing at renewal when products get “simplified” into bundles, or the additional contract clauses bubble up.
UK housing priority: ask how UK housing feature needs, support coverage, and escalation routes are protected when priorities get set outside the UK. Lets hope all decisions need not go via Heikendorf, DE in the future, that would not be clever for customers across the British Isles, RP's & AHB's.
Integration commitments: if your HMS, CRM, comms, compliance, BI Reporting, or contractor ecosystem hangs off scheduling, insist on a clear integration support plan. In a merger, interfaces are where surprises breed, particularly if some products could be depreciated, or swapped with other alternatives.
And what about OneAdvanced DRS, you know OptiTime as was? (Showing my age now)
This is the bit that should make OneAdvanced customers and prospects sit up straighter. OneAdvanced markets Dynamic Resource Scheduler as a core product for field workforce optimisation and it is also being sold on G-Cloud frameworks as Resource Scheduling (formerly DRS).
But the competitive pressure is more real than ever, because Solvares has just bought a supplier that is positioning itself as cloud-native dynamic scheduling software with a housing-first focus, and it is now (most likely) being paired with Totalmobile’s execution platform.
So the likely impact on DRS is not “DRS is dead” (not quite yet anyway). It is more like this: procurements get harder, buyers will ask more awkward questions about what “cloud” really means, and incumbents will be pushed to modernise faster because the Solvares-Totalmobile combo can pitch an end-to-end story with a cloud-native scheduling engine at its centre. Again, this is not an only option, look and think out of the box, you don’t always have to be with the big boys. Often small and perfectly formed is an advantage.
If you are a DRS landlord/user, you probably do not need to rip out and replace. But you should use this moment to extract roadmap clarity and commitments, because serious competition has just arrived with a variant of 100% true Cloud scheduling and (potentially) a much bigger chequebook behind it.
My Take is this could genuinely help providers, if it leads to better scheduling that matches the reality of housing, then actually executes cleanly in the field. However, consolidation is never a charity project. It is a control project. The winners will be the landlords who treat this like any other high-impact supplier change: tighten governance, pin down roadmap and commercials, and keep hold of their operational data and integrations so they stay in the driving seat. Hopefully the consolidated helpdesk will not give you too many sleepless nights.
Related Post: As a client told me recently, the right Critical Friend, will potentially save you more money than you spend.
I would be pleased to connect with you on LinkedIn - http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy Message
me with any issues or queries, you would like to be explored in this
blog. We generally receive a couple of suggestions each month.
Pet Shop Boys – Shopping
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009
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