Storage VAR Cristie quietly acquired by iomart

Despite making no public announcement, iomart has confirmed to CRN it has bought Commvault and Nimble Storage partner

AIM-listed hosting and cloud services provider iomart has quietely acquired storage integrator Cristie Data.

A representative for the Glaswegian outfit confirmed to CRN that it has purchased the Stroud-based storage integrator, which posted profit of £483,000 on revenues of £7.32m in its last financial year.

No public announcement has been issued because the acquisition was not of a large enough scale, the representative also confirmed.

Cristie's vendor partners include Arcserve, Arkivum, Barracuda, Cisco, Commvault, Fujitsu, Nexsan, Nimble Storage, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Veeam and VMware.

According to documents filed on Companies House, four iomart executives including CEO Angus Macsween were made directors of Cristie on 31 August.

Cristie is a long-serving IT supplier, starting off in 1969 as Cristie Electronics, a manufacturer of data logging solutions. It shifted its business in 1997 to focus on software development and value-added resell. The two halves of its business were demerged in 2008, with the IT reseller part named Cristie Data and the software part named Cristie Software.

Glasgow-based iomart grew sales by 16 per cent to £76.3m in its last financial year, during which it acquired two firms in the shape of SystemsUp and United Hosting.

"We can confirm that we have acquired Cristie Data," the iomart representative said.

Cristie declined to comment.

Jonathan Lassman, who set up his firm VAR Epaton in 2014, said Cristie's sale, along with that of fellow storage specialist S3 to Capita, vindicated his decision to enter the next-generation storage market.

"This just goes to prove we have entered the market at the right time," Lassman said. "There are probably only five or six specialist resellers in this space. The acquisitions have started and the market is proven."