UK cloud company iomart Group makes biggest acquisition

iomart Group plc has acquiredBackup Technology (‘BTL’), a leading provider of cloud backup and disaster recovery services for some of the UK’s best known brands, for £23 million (US$37million). The total consideration paid for BTL is £23m, satisfied through an initial consideration of £17.5m in cash and £3.5m from the issue of 1,205,857 new ordinary shares. A further deferred consideration of £2.0m is payable in cash on 31 January 2014.
Based in Leeds, BTL boasts an impressive customer portfolio of 200 enterprise clients including Siemens, British Red Cross, Lloyds Register, Suzuki and Pernod Ricard as well as Liverpool and Everton football clubs. Established in 2005, BTL protects many Petabytes of data for global organisations.
Angus MacSween, CEO of iomart Group plc, said: “We are delighted to welcome BTL to the Group as they have achieved ground breaking progress in the delivery of cloud backup and disaster recovery and have been on our radar for some time. BTL gives iomart a solid and well-established platform to grow further from, with a very good enterprise customer base and little crossover from the existing Group base. It’s a very good strategic fit, complementing our portfolio of existing products.”

The cash consideration for BTL has been financed by a £35m debt package from Bank of Scotland made up of a £15m Term Loan and £20m Revolving Credit Facility.

Richard McKay, Relationship Director Bank of Scotland Commercial Glasgow said: “We are delighted to continue our support of iomart’s growth, further enhancing its market leading position in cloud computing services. iomart is one of Scotland’s fastest growing businesses and these facilities will not only finance this purchase but also provide capacity to enable iomart to deliver further strategic acquisitions going forward.”

Simon Chappell, the founder and owner of BTL who is leaving to pursue new opportunities, said: “This is a really exciting moment for BTL. We very much admire what Angus and his team have done in establishing iomart as the leading player in the market for cloud services in the UK and can see that our backup expertise and services are a great fit. iomart will be a great home for BTL.”

BTL had turnover of £5.2 million for the year to the end of December 2012. It employs 16 people.

Ritchie Fiddes, co-founder of BTL who continues as Sales & Service Director, added: “As the growth of cloud services continues to gain momentum, iomart Group provides a perfect fit for BTL to be able to offer its customers additional complimentary services. Being able to plug directly into iomart’s expertise and its enterprise level data centres and fibre network means we can work with even bigger customers who require the big infrastructure and strong balance sheet that iomart can provide.”

BTL is iomart Group’s second acquisition of 2013. At the start of September, iomart bought Redstation, a provider of dedicated servers and managed services in Hampshire.

iomart Group announced the acquisition of BTL as part of its Pre-Close Trading Update which stated that customer demand for iomart’s hosted services is still strong and growing.

Angus MacSween, said: “The two recent acquisitions will continue to drive the expansion of the customer base and our revenue and profit prospects
BTL was advised by Livingstone Partners, and Pinsent Masons. iomart was advised by Shepherd and Wedderburn.