'Our product roadmap has accelerated 15 months with this acquisition. We're no longer a telco': Aptum CEO on CloudOps buy

Susan Bowen gives CRN the inside view of the Azure MSP's latest buy, and statuses how much of its legacy infrastructure it has sold off

Aptum is upping its game on being a hybrid multi-cloud MSP with its acquisition of CloudOps, an AWS, Google and Edge-to-Cloud SaaS Orchestrator.

The Montreal-based cloud consulting, managed services and software company, established in 2005, focuses on open source, cloud native platforms, networking and DevOps.

Aptum's relationship with CloudOps began in 2019 through a DevOps as-a-service partnership.

Speaking to CRN today about why it pulled the trigger on the acquisition, Aptum CEO Susan Bowen explained the buy is part of the group's transition from its telco background to an hybrid multi-cloud MSP.

"The idea for this started in 2019, but there was so much going on with our strategy to relinquish what I call the hard assets of the business, and really remove ourselves from that legacy telco background," Bowen said.

"We obviously had fibre in the ground, we had a connectivity portfolio, and we owned 19 datacentres. It was really important that we didn't get confused with what we were trying to achieve."

She added that today's acquisition reinforces the company's transition.

"We are no longer a telco, a datacentre and network provider...

"Our product roadmap has been accelerated by 15 months actually as a result."

Aptum shifting focus on managed services

Aptum has been on this transformation journey for the past three years, trimming a lot of fat along the way.

In a bid to sharpen its focus on managed services, the group has shed its datacentres from 19 to now owning just three critical infrastructure sites: two in the US and one in the UK.

"This acquisition is very exciting. It allows us to go above the stack. They also have some great software solutions and it allows us to accelerate our single pane of glass portal which will give us all the credentials to move faster than that."

What's next for Aptum?

As it continues on its transformation journey, Bowen outlined lies ahead for the group.

"I'm not going to take my eyes off acquisition if the right organisation is available owned by private equity investors," she said.

"DigitalBridge - who are constantly supporting some of the best companies out there - we are the services organisation inside their business.

"When you think about Europe, they own the likes of AtlasEdge or have a big investment in that. We stand out now, we are the services organisation for them and so we won't take our foot off the pedal."

Adding more depth into what she has her sights set on regarding trends in the market, Bowen revealed she still sees DataOps as a major opportunity.

"I think if there were two things that I'm very focused on now, it's the Lego blocks of cloud platform engineering. That's really, really important that we can continue to provide or be able to bolster our capability in that space.

"Also, you start to hear about the super cloud and how the edge solutions are building the super cloud. And I think my theory on this is, move over DevOps and bring in DataOps.

"So if there were acquisitions around data management that would probably be high on my list."