Month: December 2016

Claranet agrees to acquire CredibiliT and expands into Brazil

  • The move reinforces Claranet’s strategy and the ambition to become a recognised global player in the managed hybrid cloud hosting market
  • With headquarters in São Paulo, CredibiliT is one of the major AWS partners in Latin America and is also a growing Azure partner
  • With this acquisition Claranet continues its growth strategy and expands its reach into a new market that offers high growth potential in cloud services

Leading pan-European managed services provider (MSP) Claranet has acquired Brazilian cloud services provider CredibiliT Tecnologia Ltda, in a move that has expanded the company’s size and reach, opening it up to a new region with high growth potential.

The acquisition positions Claranet as one of the most ambitious and dynamic players in the global private, public and hybrid cloud hosting markets.

CredibiliT was founded in 2009 and quickly implemented a full public cloud adoption strategy, becoming a respected cloud player in Brazil, where it is one of only two providers with AWS Premier Consulting Partner status. It has also more recently created an Azure practice and quickly reached Silver Cloud Platform competency. With its multi-cloud approach, CredibiliT has positioned itself as the cloud service provider of choice for customers looking to create new applications or migrate to Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. Both providers have data centres in the São Paulo region, from which they serve Latin America.

Headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil, CredibiliT has an annual turnover of R$30 million (circa £7.5 million), employs 40 staff and serves 100 clients from a wide range of sectors, including Pepsico, Webmotors, Smiles, Editora Abril and TV Globo.

With an ambitious growth strategy, the Claranet Group has grown steadily in Europe, both organically and by acquisition. The Group has annual revenues of over £215 million, employs more than 1,250 staff and works with over 5,800 customers across the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands and Brazil.

Commenting on the acquisition Charles Nasser, founder and CEO of the Claranet Group, said:

This acquisition offers us the opportunity to become the leading cloud services provider in Brazil which is an exciting high growth market. Despite operating platforms for our clients globally for many years, this is our first acquisition outside of Europe. The combination of CredibiliT and Claranet, which already had the highest levels of competence in both AWS and Azure, will create a stronger competitor in the Brazilian market and establish new avenues for growth.”

Daniel Galante (CEO) and André Guerra (CFO), both founders of CredibiliT, will stay in the enlarged business as key senior executives of Claranet in Brazil. Claranet plans to reinforce its Brazilian operation by providing benefits of scale and a larger portfolio, accelerating growth in the region.

Daniel Galante commented:

We are delighted to join forces with Claranet. Being part of a larger group with a similar focus will allow us to be stronger, will reinforce our credibility and give us access to benefits of scale as well as more customers, opportunities and investment capacity. Having celebrated its 20th anniversary recently, Claranet is one of the most established Internet and cloud era services provider in the industry. Importantly, it has kept its agility which puts it in a strong position to adapt in a market that is growing consistently and under constant change.”

Claranet boosts service offering with the addition of Office 365

New service complements Claranet’s existing offering and opens new opportunities for enhanced communication and collaboration

Managed services provider Claranet has integrated Microsoft Office 365 into its portfolio. The new offering will see Claranet deliver Microsoft’s business-enabling tools through its enterprise-grade network and managed services provision, enabling the company to provide its customers with the full range of solutions they need to drive the necessary digital transformation to achieve business growth.

Office 365 provides organisations with tools that enable them to run their business more efficiently. By moving their office applications and data to the cloud and by supporting more effective collaboration, businesses are able to reduce capital expenditure and drive competitiveness. It also enables businesses to adopt more flexible and mobile working. Office 365 works across a wide range of devices such as laptops, tables and smartphones, so users can work whenever and wherever they choose, in a secure way.

Office 365, when used in conjunction with Claranet’s Hosted Voice service, which is powered by BT, forms the basis of a comprehensive and reliable unified communications service. Claranet’s customers will be able to upgrade entirely to Claranet’s enterprise-grade and network-integrated Hosted Voice service, while maintaining the look and feel they are used to by using Skype for Business as the front end tool.

Neil Thomas, Director of Communications Services, commented:

Office 365 is a core part of our communications portfolio strategy to help customers achieve greater levels of productivity and collaboration. As an addition to Claranet’s wider portfolio it is a natural fit for the modern business, complementing our existing service offerings and meaning customers can work with a single provider to help them maximise their technology investments. Our Hosted Voice service is particularly complementary with Office 365 and provides users with the Skype for Business front-end tool with an enterprise-grade voice platform from BT.

An important part of our Office 365 service model involves working with customers to analyse their business and users in order to propose the most suitable migration and adoption model. We also introduce newer Office 365 suite services such as Planner, Yammer, and Groups and consult on how these can deliver value to their business. The resulting information is then used to deliver a hassle-free migration, reducing pressure on the IT team from the beginning of the process. With in-life support from a team of experts, IT teams are further freed to focus on more valuable activities. The end result is that our customers are gaining competitive advantage as their IT teams are able to concentrate on core projects while all colleagues can collaborate and communicate more effectively,” Neil concluded.