BCM One Buys CloudStrategies' Microsoft Certs, Employees, Clients

**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting mergers in May-June 2016.**

BCM One has acquired certain assets of CloudStrategies Group, a Microsoft Gold Partner and cloud computing professional-services company.

BCM One purchased all of CloudStrategies’ certifications for Microsoft, which includes all employees and clients. The team brings several years of experience managing customer deployments across the entire Microsoft suite of cloud services including Office 365, Skype for Business and Azure, the company said.

Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Frank Ahearn, BCM One’s founder and co-CEO, tells Channel Partners that this is likely the first of many acquisitions as part of his company’s strategy going forward.

“Microsoft has many different disciplines … there [are] suites of services that Microsoft offers that we need to make sure that we have the proper in-house expertise [for], as opposed to subbing out those statements of work, and actually doing the work ourselves, like Azure,” he said. “We have Azure expertise, but we really want to deep dive.”{ad}

CloudStrategies has deployed Microsoft cloud services to more than 500 customers nationally, across various key verticals, and supported the migration of more than 100,000 users. Its delivery of services range from design to migration, and also included ongoing training and client support.

“One of the things that people were asking us, and when I say people I mean channel-partner owners … is how many of these Microsoft Office 365 migrations have you done?” Ahearn said. “We’ve been doing them for internal customers, clients, for the past nine months to a little over a year very successfully, but we didn’t have hundreds of thousands of Office 365 seats that we’ve done in the past. So it’s immediate credibility for the partner community and they feel at ease when they’re bringing us business because they know that it’s going to be done right the first time. That migration can get a little hairy at times if people don’t know what they’re doing.”

Before the acquisition, BCM One contacted some of its top channel partners and asked them how this would affect them, he said.

“One out in California in particular … we got some really, really good feedback from them saying that this is …

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… what they’ve been looking for, that they’ve been looking for somebody that they’ve been doing business with for years that they can trust,” Ahearn said. “And it’s not a master agent that they’re going through – we’re actually a [cloud services provider] – so we’re putting in our orders directly with Microsoft. BCM One is a master agent as well as a CSP, as well as a reseller.”

BCM One became a Microsoft partner nearly two years ago and is certified to host Microsoft Customer Immersion Experience sessions (CIEs).

CloudStrategies brings numerous certifications including: Gold Cloud Productivity, Silver Messaging, Silver Midmarket Solution Provider and Silver Small and Midmarket Cloud Solutions. Pete Zarras, CloudStrategies’ founder, will lead the Microsoft Cloud Practice for BCM One.

“The acquisition of CloudStrategies by BCM One builds on the strengths of both partners and will allow the combined company to extend their services to deliver new cloud solutions to our joint customers,” said Stephen Boyle, vice president, U.S. partners for Microsoft. “The focus on Skype for Business, cloud productivity and Azure is well aligned to the priorities we are driving across the Microsoft partner ecosystem.”