Claranet fine-tunes cloud strategy with acquisition

MSP grabs AWS specialist Bashton Ltd as it strives to keep up with complicated customer demands

Ambitious services player Claranet has made another acquisition in the form of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and DevOps specialist Bashton.

The firm claims the deal, for an undisclosed sum, complements its recent acquisitions of Linux IT and Techgate, and will help it further develop its DevOps capabilities and support its customers' diverse applications on public cloud infrastructure.

Bashton's annual revenues are around £1.2m, and it works primarily with retail and media customers. Claranet claims Bashton's skills will enable it to deliver managed application hosting services on any combination of public and private cloud infrastructure.

As a result of its recent acquisitions, the Claranet Group is now a £165m-turnover company with more than 1,000 staff and 5,500 customers in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal.

Michel Robert, Claranet UK's managing director, said: "Bashton was a natural company to join Claranet and follows a number of strategically important acquisitions we have made in the past year across Europe to enhance our public cloud capabilities. The development of managed services on third-party clouds is a key focus for Claranet, and the skills and experience brought by Bashton go a long way to helping us to manage more complex applications in these environments.

He added: "As cloud adoption increases, the real value we can add as a managed services provider is in our expertise, tooling and automation capabilities, such as those offered by Bashton. We are therefore focused on further developing our advanced hosting capabilities to streamline our customers' operations and underpin the evolution of our managed application hosting services."

Sam Bashton, founder of Bashton, added: "Claranet's application-centric approach to combining hosting and networking services, including its Cloud Connect service into AWS, demonstrates a solid understanding of the challenges faced by businesses today. I am very confident that Bashton customers will benefit from Claranet's capabilities. I'm especially pleased to be joining Claranet to help strengthen and contribute to the future development of its public cloud capabilities."