K3 swallows Willow Starcom

Consultancy splashes out nearly £2m on acquisition of storage and datacentre specialist

K3 Hosting has doubled its earning potential overnight by acquiring datacentre specialist Willow Starcom for a reported £1.75m.

Under the deal, K3 Hosting has taken on the entire Willow Starcom workforce, along with its 240 customers, giving it a customer base of more than 300 and putting the combined firm on course to hit £7m turnover by the end of the year.

The businesses will be merged and rebranded at both Willow Starcom's existing Wigan-based offices, and K3 Hosting's Edinburgh location, and it adds on-premise design, implementation and IT system support to K3's hosting and managed services repertoire.

It also means the company can service both enterprise-level firms and SMBs.

Neil Farnworth, managing director of K3 Hosting, said in a statement: "Willow Starcom is a well-established business with a very mature on-premise support and implementation team. This acquisition means that we will now be able to expand our services to deploy mission-critical IT applications on-premise using Willow Starcom's specialist implementation team.

"Our enterprise-class infrastructure previously meant that we were best suited to support larger businesses but with the additional hosting capabilities that Willow Starcom has brought to K3 Hosting, we can now offer an unparalleled service to smaller SMEs as well."