Technology M&A landscape: Cloud is accelerating pace of MSP buyouts

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Lynn Haber.

It may not be a land rush but larger profitable and growing MSPs are fodder for acquisition in today’s IT market as cloud computing becomes more integral to the way companies think about IT and the solution providers they do business with.  Evidence of this can be found at both All Covered, an IT services company and division of Konica Minolta Solutions US Inc., with more than two dozen locations nationwide, and the AJP Group LLC, a venture capital firm in Raleigh, N.C. In fact, All Covered has 30 acquisitions under its belt over just the last five years.

"Acquisition allows us to accelerate our growth, to bring in technology capabilities we didn’t have prior to the acquisition as well as vertical industry expertise," said Bruce Teichman, director of corporate development at All Covered. To attain a similar level of growth organically would take 20 years, he added. "Buy it and it’s immediate."…

That’s the motivation behind three high-profile technology M&A announcements made in June. IBM, for example, made public its definitive agreement to acquire SoftLayer Technologies Inc., a cloud computing infrastructure provider, as a path to accelerate the build-out of its public cloud infrastructure and its SmartCloud portfolio. IBM also announced a new cloud services division…

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