By Business & Finance 
Tim Murphy, CEO, Strencom and Lewis McMahon, CEO, Storage Online
The Irish managed connectivity and cloud computing provider, has acquired Storage Online, experts in disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), in a deal which will increase Strencom’s turnover by €2m over the next three years.
Storage Online was established in 2002 and employs five people in Dublin, Sligo and Galway. The acquisition will see these five roles being integrated into Strencom, bringing its total number of employees to 30. Strencom customers will benefit from new managed data back-up and recovery testing services as well as enhanced engineering capabilities.
Storage Online has 43 customers, which include many local authorities around the country and the HSE. The additional revenues will come from Storage Online’s existing customers and from new opportunities for cross-selling and upselling to one another’s existing customer bases. Alongside managed connectivity, cloud computing and unified communications, Strencom will have the enhanced ability to offer a full suite of data recovery, back-up and testing services to both its new and existing customers.
Strencom’s existing services, including managed hosting in the cloud, will benefit from the addition of a unique DRaaS proposition. The global market for DRaaS is expected to grow at an annual rate of more than 50 per cent between 2015 and 2019, which opens up significant opportunities for Strencom.
Strencom currently has 140 customers across a number of industries including retail, agri-business, financial, and construction/engineering. Its average deal size has doubled to €120,000 since 2013. Its network is used by most Irish citizens at least once a week for purchasing groceries or collecting pharmacy prescriptions. Transactions totalling more than €35bn are supported by Strencom infrastructure every year.
Tim Murphy, CEO, Strencom, said: “The decision to acquire Storage Online made sense as its offering completely integrates with our services and what our customers need. It’s the ideal time to offer these services, which are hugely complementary to our existing managed hosting and cloud business. This acquisition puts Strencom in a very strong position with a complete solution offering around managed cloud and disaster recovery.
“Historically, organisations have spent a lot of money and resources on back-up, however very little is spent on testing the ability to recover. As part of our cloud offering – whether it’s our virtual data centre or our custom designed managed hosting service – customers enjoy confidence in our expertise from start to finish, from managed cloud hosting, to back-up, testing and recovery.
“We are delighted to grow and expand our services with Storage Online. We are actively looking to acquire more cloud services companies and look forward to continuing to grow this year and into the future.”
Lewis McMahon, managing director, Storage Online, commented: “Our expert knowledge and experience of managed backup and recovery services fits very well with Strencom’s expert provision of hosting in the cloud. Strencom were already selling our services so the acquisition was a logical next step. We know the team and their capabilities very well and we are excited about the opportunities that will arise from our integration with Strencom.”
