Getronics accelerates its digital portfolio transformation following the acquisition of Colt’s managed cloud business
Getronics announces strategic business partnership with Colt
– Getronics family expands its leading Cloud business following acquisition of Colt’s Gartner-endorsed managed cloud business in 10 countries
– Long-term operational and go to market partnership formed between Getronics family and Colt
London, November 16th, 2015 – The Getronics family, a group operating under the brands of Getronics, GWA and Connectis, today announces that it has expanded its European Cloud business via the acquisition of Colt’s managed cloud business (“Colt Managed Cloud”). Furthermore, a long-term strategic partnership has been agreed between the Getronics family and Colt, where the Getronics family will provide Managed Cloud services to Colt’s customer base and the Getronics family will utilise Colt’s network, voice and data centre capabilities.
The deal includes the acquisition of Cloud technologies and support services across 10 countries (the UK, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, India, Romania and Switzerland). Colt Managed Cloud employs staff working across operations, transition and engagement, presales, service management and support functions and has around 600 customers across multiple verticals including financial services, media and government, which will benefit from a long term, secure and seamless provision of services.
The Getronics family has been realising a dramatic portfolio shift since its acquisition by Aurelius in 2012. Its focus and investment in a portfolio of IT Services has paid off, transforming the heritage Workspace provider into a digitally-focussed organisation, dedicated to the end-user, providing customers with best in class future-ready IT services. Various acquisitions have strengthened this shift towards the newer portfolio, such as Spanish acquisitions Thales, Telvent and Steria Iberica which bolstered the Getronics family’s Apps expertise, and NEC’s direct sales & services business in four countries which strengthened their Unified Communications capabilities.
Similarly, the Cloud platform being acquired from Colt will be highly complementary to the Getronics family’s own fast-growing Cloud Services platform enabling the group to offer pan-European Cloud services to its customers. The platform is well invested in and advanced, being positioned by Gartner as a leader in the European Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-enabled Managed Hosting for the past three consecutive years.
Mark Cook, Getronics Group CEO comments “We have been relentlessly pursuing our digital transformation and portfolio shift strategy and today’s announcement demonstrates our commitment to offering the latest, best of breed IT services to our customers. We are delighted with this latest acquisition, and we are looking forward to welcoming the transferring customers and employees into the Getronics family in the New Year.”
Rakesh Bhasin, Colt Chief Executive Officer comments “I am pleased that we have reached an agreement with Getronics, a leading European provider of IT Services. This transaction is a positive step for our customers as it provides an expanded set of innovative services and long term security from an established, growing company. It also provides an exciting future for our employees. We look forward to partnering with Getronics through this transaction on a long term basis.”
The financial terms of the deal are undisclosed. The completion of this transaction is subject to regulatory and competition clearances and compliance with local labour laws.
About Getronics
The Getronics family is an ICT Services group consisting of the Getronics and Connectis brands and is owned by the AURELIUS Group, a holding company headquartered in Munich, Germany. With an extensive history that extends over 125 years, the Getronics family has approximately 6,000 employees in 18 countries across Europe, Asia Pacific & Latin America, and has a complete portfolio of integrated ICT services for the large enterprise and public sector markets. This includes Workspace, Applications, Communication, Data Centre, Cloud, Consulting, Product and Managed Services.
Getronics is a lead in the Global Workspace Alliance, a unique model that provides customers with a consistent IT service throughout the world, with one single point of contact and billing entity, delivering services to 90 countries. The GWA is ranked number 3 globally according to OVUM’s Managed/Maintained End-user Devices with a total of 7.4M assets.
About Colt
Colt provides network, voice, and data centre services to thousands of businesses around the world, allowing them to focus on delivering their business goals instead of the underlying infrastructure. Customers include 18 of the top 25 banks and diversified financial groups and 19 out of the top 25 companies in both global media and telecoms industries (Forbes 2000 list, 2014). In addition, Colt works with over 50 exchange venues and 13 European central banks.
Colt operates across Europe, Asia and North America with connections into over 200 cities globally. It completed the acquisition of KVH in 2014 – which now operates under the Colt brand – an integrated data centre and communications services business, with headquarters in Tokyo and operations in Hong Kong, Seoul and Singapore.
