Aurelius Group has acquired Colt Managed Cloud (CMC), the managed cloud business of Colt Group SA (Colt), which will now be integrated with another Aurelius portfolio company ICT services provider Getronics Group.
In addition a long-term strategic business partnership has been agreed between Getronics and Colt which will allow Getronics to provide managed cloud services to Colt’s customer base and utilise Colt's network, voice and data centre capabilities.
France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Romania and India) and employs a skilled workforce across operations, transition and engagement, pre-sales, service management and support functions. CMC retains a strong base of long-term customer contracts from around 600 blue chip customers across multiple sectors including financial services and media. The Company is forecast to deliver revenues of around EUR77m in the current year to December 2015.
This deal represents the latest addition to the Getronics family, which has grown significantly through a strategic acquisitions programme since Aurelius’ initial investment in 2012. Under Aurelius’ ownership to date, Getronics has achieved a steady growth in revenues, and transitioned from a traditional portfolio of workspace services to a broader service suite aimed to accommodate today’s mobile and cloud enabled enterprises. Previous strategic investments have included the successful integration of Aurelius’ IT portfolio companies Telvent, Thales Spain and Connectis Consulting into the business. Getronics also acquired the operations of NEC Enterprise Solutions across four countries in October 2013 to further the growth of its Unified Communications business. More recently Getronics acquired a subsidiary of T-Systems in Germany called Individual Desktop Solutions GmbH.
Dr Dirk Markus, CEO of Aureliusm says: “I would like to thank the team at Colt who have worked closely with us throughout this corporate carve-out process. We are extremely pleased to be announcing this deal which will significantly strengthen and accelerate Getronics’ digital portfolio transformation and better position both companies to exploit the rapidly growing €40bn European cloud market.
“CMC is a high margin business with a large portfolio of reoccurring revenues underpinned by long-term customer contracts. Furthermore, both CMC and Getronics will benefit from a long term strategic partnership with Colt that will enable the ongoing provision of up to date, seamless services to their strengthened customer base.”
Tristan Nagler, Managing Director of Aurelius in the UK, says: “This deal illustrates Aurelius’ core strengths and investment strategy of working with corporates such as Colt to provide an investment solution for non-core assets. In this case, Colt was looking to refocus on its core infrastructure business and Aurelius was able to move at an accelerated pace to provide a good home for CMC. Aurelius actively seeks deal opportunities with a high degree of complexity, such as this carve-out of CMC which has a significant number of assets, operations, customers and employees across multiple geographies.”
