SoftwareONE acquires full stake in Latin America MSP

Licencing giant buys up remaining shares in Columbian firm after grabbing 60 per cent stake in 2019

SoftwareONE has acquired the remaining 40 per cent stake in Latin American MSP InterGrupo.

The deal is expected to close at the beginning of 2021.

Based in Medellin, in Columbia, InterGrupo employs around 1,400 staff across Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Brazil and Panama.

The firm claims to be a specialist in application modernisation and cloud solutions through its strong ties with Microsoft.

InterGrupo made CHF 35m (€32.39m) in gross profits over the 12-month period ending June 2020, according to SoftwareONE.

The Swiss software and licencing firm bought a controlling 60 per cent stake in the Columbian firm in June 2019. It claims InterGrupo has produced very promising results since it stepped into the frame last year.

SoftwareONE claims it has been working on standardising and streamlining InterGrupo's application modernisation service catalogue over the last few months to make them available to its 65,000 customers and partners globally.

It also claims that it has been working to flesh out the firm's managed services offering.

SoftwareONE CEO Dieter Schlosser said: "This acquisition highlights the strategic importance of a global practice in application modernization with hyperscalers, such as AWS, Google and Microsoft.

"This helps our 65,000 customers on their journey to the cloud not only from an infrastructure point of view, but also regarding their existing applications. The technology, agility, and efficiency gains of the cloud can only be realized if applications are re-engineered. DevOps in the cloud is a priority for all hyperscalers, particularly for AWS. They have the goal of transforming millions of applications to their platforms over the coming years, with the help of partners such as SoftwareONE."

InterGrupo founder, Darío Solórzano, added: "The last few months have proven how InterGrupo and SoftwareONE can mutually benefit from each other and I am excited to herald a new era. I am certain that being an integral part of SoftwareONE will benefit our employees and more so allow us to empower our customers worldwide for their digital transformation, through innovative technologies, extending from cognitive computing, blockchain, IoT, advanced analytics to cloud."

Acquisitions have been central to SoftwareONE's growth strategy in recent years. It acquired Comparex, another monolith in the software licencing space, in 2018 adding some 2,500 new employees to the business.

It has gone on to make nine more acquisitions across the UK, the Netherlands, Columbia, Switzerland, Singapore, Japan and Australia.

In its latest H1 results, SoftwareONE said that its efforts to integrate Comparex into the rest of the business are ahead of schedule, with country-specific migrations taking place throughout 2020.

SoftwareONE grew revenues by 5.6 per in the first six months of 2020 to €3.94bn. Its adjusted EBITDA grew by 18.2 per cent on a constant currancy basis to CHF 120m.