ANS pounces on Cisco partner Eison
Staff informed today of acquisition of £7.5m-turnover connectivity specialist
ANS says its first acquisition for more than five years, of a fellow Mancunian Cisco partner, means it will no longer have to leave potential connectivity sales on the table.
ANS informed staff today that it has bought Eison, a Stockport-based connectivity specialist with £7.5m revenues, 35 staff and a customer base that includes supermarket chain Booths and car dealership Swansway.
The deal, which was for an undisclosed sum, will propel ANS' revenues to £60m.
ANS chief executive Paul Sweeney told CRN the purchase would have a similar transformative impact on ANS' business to the last acquisition it made, of Alpha in late 2010.
"Eison are very much around the WAN and have some fantastic customers they're doing huge WANs for," he explained.
"We do the datacentre really well with all the Flexpod stuff we're doing and by putting the two together we're getting a load of synergies. Before, we were leaving money on the table. There's no customer crossover, so we can go to all their customers with our datacentre story and to our customers with a really strong WAN story."
Founded in 2006, Eison ranked 75th in the Sunday Times Tech Track 100 in 2014 and claims to have drawn £5.3m of its £7.5m turnover for its year ending 31 October 2015 from recurring revenue.
"Like us, Eison are really about managed services and the management and intelligence they put on top of it," Sweeney (pictured below) said.
Although ANS plans to integrate Eison's office and brands as quickly as possible, Sweeney said all of its staff - including founders Jamie Coan and Richard Peck - will remain with the organisation.
"One of our biggest challenges is recruitment so this solves a problem for us," Sweeney (pictured) said. "We told the guys today that we need every single one of them."
He added: "We've already had feedback from one customer this morning who told us they have a massive datacentre project coming up next year and the fact we have all these skills means they can put it all our way - we are already getting two plus two equals five within minutes of announcing it."