PE Firms Explore $2 Billion Ensono Cloud MSP Sale: Report

Private equity firm Charlesbank Capital may soon seek to sell Ensono, a Top 200 Public Cloud MSP, for roughly $2 billion, PE Hub reports.

Related: Ensono cuts some staff.

Charlesbank Capital and M/C Partners acquired Ensono -- the former Axciom IT business -- in May 2015 for $190 million in cash. The MSP re-emerged as Ensono, backed by a new management team, in January 2016.

Key Ensono leaders include multiple executives who previously led Savvis -- a cloud services provider (CSP) that CenturyLink acquired in 2011. The Savvis alumni include Ensono CEO Jeff VonDeylen; President Marc Capri; COO William Flannery; and EVP of Technology and Strategy Brian Klingbeil, among others.

Ensono Growth: Organic and Strategic Acquisitions

Under that leadership team. Ensono has grown organically and through additional acquisitions. Key deals included acquiring:

Now, Ensono is the rare MSP that has public cloud expertise across Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, plus mainframe managed services know-how. The MSP's expertise also includes managed infrastructure and application services -- particularly projects involving SAP business software.

On the consulting front, Ensono offers CIO advisory services, IT asset inventory, application dependency mapping and IT migration planning capabilities.

MSP Mergers and Acquisitions: 2020 Deal List

The MSP merger and acquisition market remains strong. ChannelE2E has tracked 36 M&A deals in the MSP sector so far in 2020 (see our M&A deal tracker here).

Valuations remain confidential for most of the MSP M&A deals. Still, some deals disclose their financial metrics. The largest MSP deal so far in 2020 involves SAIC buying the U.S. federal IT services business from Unisys for $1.2 billion -- or roughly 10.5X to 13.X annual EBITDA, according to ChannelE2E reporting.

A major portion of that Unisys asset sale involves MSP services.

Meanwhile, ChannelE2E has not independently confirmed that Ensono is up for sale.