'Game changer' - ANS Group gives update on UKFast merger

Joe Woski says UKFast has “culturally been a good fit” despite organisational structure differences

ANS Group's chief technology officer has said inheriting UKFast's capabilities as part of the two companies merging has been a "game changer".

Joe Wolski says UKFast has "culturally been a good fit" despite organisational structure differences as he provided an update on how the merger between the two companies is going.

The companies joined forces in 2021 after ANS sold a majority stake to Inflexion, with UKFast adopting the ANS name as part of the deal.

Since then, the public cloud transformation specialist has targeted doubling annual revenues by the end of 2025 and hitting an EBITDA of £80m.

Wolski says they are still on target to hit that figure, adding the plan is to "dominate" the SMB market for the next few years.

He told CRN: "Both of us are very different in our organisational structures due to the kind of propositions that we provided and the customer bases that we worked with.

"There was very little crossover, especially in the technical and delivery areas of the business, they were very much complementary.

"That has been fundamental for us providing differentiation moving forward.

"So for us, we inherited two capabilities - service and product - and that has been a game changer for us.

"Culturally, we have a very good fit with that nature of us being so close."

ANS also recently launched a new managed public cloud service for SMBs in a move it claims slashes the cost and complexity of cloud operations.

The new offering allows business to move their code into a pre-configured AWS or Azure environment and launch their new platform and virtual machines "at the touch of a button".

Wolski says a big focus when creating the service was "educating the customer" and making sure they've got the knowledge and the skills.

He added the move was a "no brainer", claiming the merger allowed it to create a platform to add value to SMB customers in a "sustainable and profitable way".

"Finding new ways to grow was really important to us," he said.

"When you look at the market, certainly over the last two years, organisations are struggling to recruit and build bigger teams.

"They are looking to grow scale but in pursuit of that growth, it's forcing them to look for higher fees, both in professional managed services, which in turn is forcing them to start to push towards bigger companies with bigger budgets."

"That's really left a huge gap in the market of strong managed cloud providers being able to service the SMB market."