Greenville-based Green Cloud Technologies acquired Ohio-based ANS Corporation in a move to scale its business and diversify its potential customer pool, according to CEO Shay Houser. The acquisition included 11 employees and a production data center in Akron, Ohio, which complements its existing production data centers in Nashville and Greenville, Houser told Upstate Business Journal.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and no leadership changes were made in conjunction with the acquisition.
“For Green Cloud, this was our first acquisition with this transaction,” said Houser, who said company growth could lend itself to another acquisition as soon as next year. “The growth rate has been pretty exceptional. Our growth rate from 2012 to 2015 has been in excess of 4,000 percent.”
Green Cloud also announced a $5 million investment from Spring Capital Partners, which was unrelated to the acquisition of ANS Corp., said Houser. The investment will continue to build out Green Cloud’s sales and marketing team, as the company has hired six people and expanded by 3,000 square feet of office space in the last 60 days, he said.
“Our business is a scale business, so we’re trying to add additional scale, which drives down costs, and we can pass that on to our customers,” said Houser. “They also use different technology, Microsoft-based versus VM-based, which opens us up to different customers.”
Green Cloud provides infrastructure, virtual desktops, disaster recovery and backup solutions for customers in 35 states. The company employs more than 50 people after the ANS Corp. acquisition, and was recently recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in South Carolina. ANS Corp. is a retail and wholesale provider of cloud hosting services.
