Sentri Buys Clearway for Microsoft Office 365 Cloud Expertise

By samdizzy

office-365

Sentri already has on-premises Microsoft Lync, Exchange, System Center, and SharePoint practices. Clearway has Microsoft Office 365, Windows Intune and Azure expertise. In fact, Clearway as Microsoft’s first certified cloud partner.

Sentri and Clearway have been collaborating on customer projects over the past year, so a merger seemed to be the next logical step, the two companies say. Together, Clearway and Sentri have won more than 15 Microsoft partner excellence awards in the past 10 years, the companies added. Financial terms of the business combination were not disclosed.

Alex Beletsky remains Sentri’s Founding Partner. Gene Rodgers shifts from Clearway CEO to Sentri Chief Strategy Officer (CSO). Colm Whelan, a leader in both the SharePoint and Office 365 communities, becomes Director of Cloud Services.

Key Considerations

I’ve reached out to Sentri and Clearway for additional comment. Among my questions:

More M&A Coming? (Yes)

Microsoft claims to have more than 42,000 channel partners focused on cloud computing. I don’t know how many of them have thriving Office 365 and Windows Azure business practices. But it’s a safe bet M&A activity will accelerate in the months ahead.

Over on MSPmentor, our sister site, we track several MSP mergers and acquisitions per month. Most of those deals involve MSPs buying peers that have some form of cloud expertise. But I haven’t heard much banter yet about Office 365 consulting firms as M&A targets.

But it’s starting. In the Office 365 market. And in the Google Apps market. Last month Cloud Sherpas (a major Google Apps Authorized Reseller) merged with GlobalOne (a well-known Salesforce.com consulting firm).

The interesting part of this: I’m not hearing about M&A to drive recurring cloud revenues. Instead, it sounds like many of the deals involve cloud consulting revenues… At least so far.