MSP Buying Spree Meets MSP Backup Binge

Two things are hotter than hot in the MSP space – acquisitions and online backup. iomart Group from Glasgow combined both with the acquisition of Backup Technology (yup, that’s the name of the company and its technology).

Backup Technology (BTL) is based in Leeds in the U.K. and counts some 200 customers, such as Suzuki, Pernod and Siemens. Overall, BTL handles more than 10 petabytes of backup.

The company’s services are based on software from Asigra and hardware from NetApp.

CEO of iomart Angus MacSween has apparently had his eye on BTL for some time, impressed with how the company handles itself in the disaster recovery and cloud backup markets.

Now iomart can build a backup business off what BTL already had in place. But with more bulk, iomart will be able to reach out to larger customers, argues Ritchie Fiddes, co-founder of BTL, who continues as sales and service director.

It isn’t just the company size that matters. iomart can now support BTL services with its fiber network and enterprise-class data centers.

BTL also has its own infrastructure and brings to the table 10 data centers and some 20,000 servers in the U.K.

On a Roll

iomart is getting used to buying companies, having recently bought a rival, Redstation. This isn’t the first rival iomart has bought as it also acquired hosting outfit Titan. Also in 2013, iomart snagged Melbourne Service Hosting, Internet Engineering and Skymarket.

EMC Deal

Besides working with NetApp, iomart also has a fresh deal with storage kingpin EMC to drive cloud storage.

iomart recently signed on to the EMC Velocity Service Provider program. Through the program EMC arms MSPs with storage and virtualization tools upon which to base services.

iomart mainly serves the U.K. but is looking to expand more aggressively into Europe.

Eight months ago iomart set up EMC’s Avamar deduplication and backup software which became a part of iomart’s backup-as-a-service (BaaS) solution. By being part of Velocity, iomart can work more closely with EMC to build and sell new services.