When Presidio acquired Sequoia Worldwide earlier today, the deal completed a four-month buyout dance involving a range of hybrid cloud consulting and software development services, according to Presidio CEO Bob Cagnazzi. But that's not all.
In an interview with ChannelE2E, Cagnazzi described a midmarket hybrid cloud world where it's "still the first inning in a game where most customers haven't gone to bat yet." Some of those customers are stuck in neutral. Others know they have a public cloud presence but they don't know how to manage it. And midmarket endusers -- the employees consuming IT -- find it really difficult to deal with a traditional IT department when they can just go straight to a public cloud provider, he adds.
Hybrid Cloud Challenges and Solutions
Presidio's solution to those hybrid cloud challenges? It involves marrying Sequoia Worldwide's consulting, software and cloud broker expertise with the Presidio Managed Cloud. According to Presidio, that managed cloud:
- Creates a service catalog for CIOs to leverage and provide IT as a service to the business.
- Enables end users to procure IT services through a self-service portal across PCs, tablets and smartphones.
- Allows customers to extend their single-tenant private cloud environment today to a hybrid cloud approach leveraging multi-tenant public cloud services to meet tomorrow’s business demands.
- Offers flexible consumption models for IT whether the resources are based in the private cloud or sourced from public cloud providers.
Instead of competing head-on with Amazon Web Services, Presidio Managed Cloud allows customers to mix and match their private and public cloud instances. "If you do all those steps correctly, over time, you'll have visibility into every workload," says Cagnazzi.
Presidio, Sequoia Get to Know Each Other
With those goals in mind, Sequoia Worldwide -- which has about 45 employees -- had been helping Presidio with some of its managed cloud development efforts before the M&A deal came together. By acquiring Sequoia, Presidio gains a team that will offer a full set of consulting services to help customers craft their entire hybrid cloud strategies -- along with associated roadmaps. Sequoia also has cloud broker technology and relationships with major public cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure, among others.
And what does Sequoia gain from the deal? The scale of working with Presidio -- and roughly 600 account managers who can sell Sequoia's consulting, software and hybrid cloud services, Cagnazzi notes.
IT Service Providers Mergers, Acquisitions
M&A activity has been fast and furious in recent weeks across the IT channel. Among the recent examples:
- Multiple Microsoft Dynamics VARs and IT consulting firms have been acquired in 2015.
- Private equity firms have been buying up IT service providers and VARs.
- And emerging cloud service providers have acquired MSPs for regional and technical reach.
PS: The deals won't stop there. ChannelE2E has learned that yet another small but very well known regional MSP has been acquired by a regional voice and data company. Details are expected to surface sometime on or about December 1, 2015. We'll bring you the interviews as information is confirmed to us.
