Managed services provider Claranet has acquired Warrington-based Amazon Web Services (AWS) specialist Bashton Limited to bolster its managed public cloud offering.
The acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, follows Claranet’s 2015 acquisitions of UK firms LinuxIT and Techgate as part of the company’s efforts to develop its DevOps capabilities in the public cloud.
Established in 2004, Bashton helps its customers run mission critical web applications on AWS infrastructure. Working primarily with retail and media customers, it has developed expertise around the rapid creation of environments within AWS. It also specialises in DevOps tooling, which enables customers to rapidly deploy code updates into their web application, as well as monitor and improve performance.
Bashton’s annual revenues are £1.2m and the company counts ITV, Odeon, BBC Worldwide, Liverpool Football Club, made.com and Virgin Holidays amongst its customers.
The expanded Claranet Group has annual revenues of £165m, more than 1,000 staff and 5,500 customers in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal.
“The development of managed services on third-party clouds is a key focus for Claranet, and the skills and experience brought by Bashton go a long way to helping us to manage more complex applications in these environments,” comments Claranet UK’s managing director, Michel Robert.
“As cloud adoption increases, the real value we can add as a managed services provider is in our expertise, tooling and automation capabilities, such as those offered by Bashton. We are therefore focused on further developing our advanced hosting capabilities to streamline our customers’ operations and underpin the evolution of our managed application hosting services.”
“Claranet’s application-centric approach to combining hosting and networking services, including its Cloud Connect service into AWS, demonstrates a solid understanding of the challenges faced by businesses today,” says Bashton’s founder and director, Sam Bashton. “I am very confident that Bashton customers will benefit from Claranet’s capabilities. I’m especially pleased to be joining Claranet to help strengthen and contribute to the future development of its public cloud capabilities.”
