iomart buys BTL for £23m

BTL has a portfolio of 200 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 data for global organisations.

Angus MacSween, chief executive of Glasgow-based iomart Group, said today: “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 for 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 £5.2m for the year to the end of December 2012. It employs 16 people.

Ritchie Fiddes, co-founder of BTL who continues as sales and 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.

BTL was advised by Livingstone Partners, and Pinsent Masons. iomart was advised by Shepherd and Wedderburn.