Tag: ANS

ANS snaps up covid blighted Preact

Posted on January 18, 2023 by - News

ANS has acquired the Covid damaged Microsoft partner Preact, according to a Statement of Proposals filed this week on Companies House.

Preact called in insolvency practitioner FTS Recovery on 1 December, the long-established Microsoft Gold partner employed around 60 staff in the UK and India.  The company had been doing well until Covid hit.

HMRC had threatened to wind up the Maidenhead-based outfit when it could not meet a  £300,000 tax bill on 30 November.

ANS Group completes Preact acquistion

Posted on January 4, 2023 by - News

Cloudy ANS Group has completed its acquisition of Microsoft partner Preact.

Maidenhead-based, Preact enables SMBs and charities to grow more with Dynamics 365 and CRM solutions built on the Microsoft Power Platform.

Preact has more than 4,000 customers across public and private sectors and a team of more than 800 digital transformation staff.

ANS said adding the Microsoft Gold partner would make it the “best-resourced” provider in the Microsoft Business Applications community.

Businesses booming in the North West

Posted on November 26, 2021 by - News

More than 43,255 new businesses were started up in the North West for the 12 months until September 2021, according to ONS data.

It looks like the North West of England is leading the UK’s COVID recovery, making it a ripe target for Channel sales teams. Several Manchester-based MSPs and resellers have attracted private equity attention over the last few years. ANS Group secured investment from Inflexion earlier this year, while BCN Group has been backed by Beech Tree Private Equity since 2018 and has since made several acquisitions.

For the 12 months until the end of September 2021, a total of 43,255 new businesses were established in the North West of England – an increase of 19 percent, or 6,965 more than the same period the previous year.

Meanwhile, the UK overall experienced a 15 percent increase in new businesses being started during the same period.

ANS buys Canadian Alithya

Posted on October 4, 2019 by - News

Manchester’s ANS has bought the UK operation of Canadian publicly listed consultancy Alithya.

It bought the UK portion of the Microsoft partner to boost its digital service and will result in 15 Dynamics experts being added to the ANS workforce.

CEO Paul Shannon: “We believe the two organisations are a perfect fit across many areas including culture, customer centricity and technology expertise, to name a few.

ANS Group takes a stake in Cyber X

Posted on March 8, 2018 by - News

cloudCloud outfit ANS Group thinks there is money to be made in cyber security and taken a 50 percent stake in Cyber X

ANS bought the equity previously held by Energize Capital to provide funding support for Cyber X.  Cyber X’s role is to provide punters with an automated assessment of their security options.

ANS boss Scott Fletcher said that the deal was a no-brainer because cybersecurity was a growing sector.

“The platform which has been designed and created by Cyber X is perfectly placed to support the SME market and offers businesses easy-to-understand solutions in an otherwise confusing marketplace.”

In December 2017, ANS expanded with the takeover of Webantic, a cloud transformation and app development specialist based in Manchester.

 

Cloudy ANS banked £60 million

Posted on November 3, 2017 by - News

56f884651f7b35416b9b4ca955d350b3--pom-pom-mobile-cloud-mobileCloud and managed service provider ANS saw sales grow 35.7 percent in its last financial year, taking it to a revenue of £60 million.

For the full year ending 31 March, 2017 ANS recorded a revenue of just under £62.7 million, while adjusted EBITDA rocketed over 80 percent to £12.3 million.

The growth was driven partly by the integration of Eison, which ANS acquired in 2016 and ANS’ cloud readiness assessment services.

ANS has been attempting to shift from low-margin sales to higher-margin services and drew 70 percent of its profit from cloud and services.

The company hit on a wizard wheeze of providing a service to tell clients what applications can live in the cloud as they are, which ones they need to eradicate and replace with a new app, and those should not be cloud-based.

Its customers instead of doing a straight tech refresh, are including cloud whether it is a small or large percentage.

This year ANS become an Amazon Web Services Advanced Partner, as well as a Microsoft Gold Cloud Partner.

Some 30 percent of ANS’ gross profit is still related to traditional hardware sales from customers who are buying a degree of cloud and services as no customers have been buying only hardware.

ANS saw a healthy year with Cisco, and some hefty managed WAN and LAN wins.

It has won a small number of large managed LAN deals, and traditional on-premise network projects.

ANS has now entered the third quarter of its current financial year and is already seeing a number of the cloud readiness assessment customers take up full projects with the MSP, at a quicker faster rate than was expected.