Calligo boss on M&A spree: 'We acquire in a jurisdiction and then we push hard'
Acquisitive Jersey-based MSP scores hat trick of acquisitions in Ireland this year with purchase of Cinnte Technologies
Jersey-based Calligo has completed a hat trick of Irish acquisitions this year with its latest purchase of Cinnte Technologies.
Cinnte has offices in counties Cavan and Dublin and counts Dell, Webroot and Microsoft among its vendor partners. It follows on from Calligo's acquisitions of DC Networks and Itomic Voice and Data earlier this year.
Calligo boss Julian Box told CRN that M&A has been a part of the eight-year-old MSP's growth strategy since 2016.
"We knew that we wanted to get into Ireland early on in that process; we felt that there was a big opportunity there," he explained.
"There are lots of great companies and opportunities there because Ireland is growing very rapidly, in comparison to a lot of other places in Europe. Even post-COVID, we believe there's a massive opportunity for us in Ireland, obviously, or else we wouldn't be making a third acquisition there!"
Box said that the acquisition of Cinnte serves as a means of offering "unique services" to its Irish customer base, helping them to capture, manage, optimise and monetise their data in a legal and ethical way.
"We believe it's a great opportunity to build a good presence there and offer a set of services that is relatively unique globally, let alone in Ireland," he continued.
"We are managed service provider but we approach it very differently to pretty much every other provider; we're going to bring something to Ireland that doesn't exist within the Irish marketplace, and is something that the Irish marketplace would want.
"We're focused very heavily on building a business over the next few years that really is quite transformational within the market space - we believe we're leading the MSP space with a focus on data first, not just technology."
Calligo - which counts Microsoft, VMware, NetApp and Commvault among its own vendor partners - received a $20m cash injection from private equity backers InvestCorp in 2016. Since then it has acquired three companies in Canada and Luxembourg-based AMS Systems.
Box hinted that more acquisitions are in the pipeline in both North America and the UK, stating that the firm looks at locations with high levels of data privacy capabilities.
"As we moved out from the Channel Islands - which are very data privacy-focused - we then looked to other jurisdictions that have very high levels of data privacy capabilities. In the North American space, Canada was the natural location for us because it has very strong data privacy laws, whereas the US are only just starting to do that," he elaborated.
"Our expansion strategy was very much around what the data protection laws were in each jurisdiction and with Brexit, Ireland takes on an extra dimension for us as well. Luxembourg is obviously in the EU as well, but we're a regulated entity over there, so it's not as flexible as a non-regulated entity.
"Ireland gives us the opportunity to expand into Europe and offer services across the EU, not just in Ireland. For us, M&A is very much about helping us get a foothold in a jurisdiction and then we push hard on the organic growth."