| Five yeas after it sold its A/NZ assets to IBM, UK-based Logicalis has stepped back into the Australian market by acquiring networking integrator, NetStar, for $US 19.8 million.
A long-time Cisco partner, NetStar was a spin off company from communications distributor, Anixter's networking division and established a presence in Australia, Hong Kong and Taiwan simultaneously. It now has businesses across Asia-Pacific and emoloys more than 300 staff, all of which will be retained.
NetStar Asutralia recently broke into the local datacentre market by gaining Cisco's Unified Computing Systems accreditation. While both parties previously engaged in acquisition talks, serious discussions started just three months ago.
With operations in key commercial centres such as Sydney, Taiwan adn Singapore, the company provided Logicalis with an immediate foot-in-the-door to teh Asia Pacific as well as access to a swathe of multinational clients, teh IT service provider said in a statement.
NetStar CEO, Chris Meager, will keep his position and flagged minimal changes to the integrator's operations. He said management and staff viewed the acquisition as a positive step to broaden the company's reach.
"This is just a change of ownership so the business will continue as is," Meager said. "We will sit down in our normal annual budget cycle and do planning together with Logicalis. This may result in us deciding to take on some additional capabilities to utilse what Logicalis already has to grow NetStar faster."
Logicalis cheif executive, Ian Cook, described the deal as a strategic business development.
"NetStar, with its tremendous customer base, has great capabilities and experience in the areas of network integration, datacentre and managed services, with strong annuity revenues," he said in a statement. "We expect to further build upon the Cisco focused businesses and extend our offering to include datacentre solutions to mirror other existing Logicalis markets."
Logicalis has businesses in the UK,US, Germany and South America. It is a division of Datatec Limited. The original Australia-based Logicalis operations were sold by Datatec to IBM for $US66 million back in 2004.
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