CSPs, Mergers and Acquisitions

Why Dimension Data Acquired Ceryx: Office 365 Cloud Skills

Dimension Data in April acquired Ceryx, a privately held provider of services for integrating and managing Microsoft Office 365 and hybrid email environments. Ceryx’s Cloud Control is an administrative control environment for enterprise mail and messaging. The Canadian-headquartered provider helps customize and manage hybrid cloud mail environments for enterprises that need more than just a simple Office 365 migration.

Office 365 and Hybrid Mail

Dimension Data is a long-established provider of multi-tenanted and private cloud environments. Its strategy has been to add services, in particular Microsoft services, to its cloud platform. To that end, it has acquired Ceryx, a Canadian provider of Cloud Control, a single user interface for managing and operating Office 365 and hybrid email environments.

Many enterprises are attracted to Office 365 because of Microsoft’s licensing model -- which allows them to consume email services from its multi-tenant public cloud, while retaining other components, such as SharePoint, on-premise or in a private cloud. Other enterprise customers want to segment their workforce into basic users of shared mail on Office 365 and “power” users with applications and workloads that need to run in private clouds for reasons of privacy, security, and performance.

Ceryx has developed a successful business migrating enterprises from on-premise Exchange to customized hybrid mail and messaging environments and onboarding customers to its Cloud Control management application. Cloud Control is designed to mask the complexity of managing Office 365, especially in hybrid mail environments, and Ceryx has also added self-service automation for level-1 and -2 service requests within the tool. Many large customers struggle with the transition from on-premise to hybrid environments and this creates demand for the types of tools and professional services Ceryx offers.

Dimension Data & Ceryx Synergies

Ceryx is a good fit for Dimension Data. Office 365 threatens to eat the mail hosting providers’ lunch, so they need to find ways to remain relevant to customers and provide the services Microsoft doesn’t want to offer. Ceryx brings the skills and IP to deliver hybrid cloud integration for enterprise mail customers.

The Ceryx customer base is primarily located in the US and Canada, but has recently been extended to Europe, via strategic channel partner IBM Global Services. The fact that Ceryx is IBM’s partner of choice for managing the Microsoft email component in its IT outsourcing engagements attests to the high regard for the Ceryx solution. The acquisition also validates Dimension Data’s strategic objective of increasing its presence in North America and will make a small but significant contribution to meeting its aggressive growth target for the region.

Ian Brown is senior analyst for enterprise services at Ovum. Read more Ovum blogs here.

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