Green House Data to Buy Infront for Azure, Geographic Benefits

**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting merger and acquisition news from March.**

Green House Data on Thursday said it’s buying Infront Consulting Group, it’s fifth acquisition in the last four years.

The provider of cloud, colocation, hybrid IT and managed services, based in Cheyenne, Wyoming, has used M&A as an effective growth strategy since 2014, after not buying any companies in its first seven years of existence.

Toronto-based Infront specializes in Microsoft Azure migrations, mobility, data-center and managed services. The company is global with offices on three continents.

Green House Data’s Shawn Mills

“Infront represents an opportunity to continue along the path of being able to solve our clients’ challenges while they work toward their strategic shift to the cloud,” Shawn Mills, CEO of Green House Data, told Channel Partners.

The two companies will continue to operate under their own brands for now. Green House, which is helped by roughly two-dozen MSP partners, is focused on SMBs and midsize companies, while Infront typically works with billion-dollar companies that have complex IT environments.

“Now we’ll have the ability to go up and down the full stack of companies, including Fortune 100 companies,” said Mills. “It was that expertise that was attractive to us.”

The combined company will better be able to help businesses simplify compute resources, access consulting services and optimize end-to-end application delivery. It will help shared clients compete by extending IT teams, supporting DevOps, and offering a “15-Minute Hear from a Human” response time service-level agreement (SLA).

“We saw a natural fit with Green House Data’s managed services expertise and an opportunity to organically expand into a more comprehensive platform,” said Rory McCaw, CEO of Infront Consulting Group, who will retain his role with the acquisition.

The Infront acquisition allows Green House Data to get Microsoft Azure expertise on board quickly — something its customers were clamoring for, as was revealed by survey results.

Green House says the acquisition won’t impact its MSPs partners who are purposefully handpicked to operate in U.S. markets where the company doesn’t have a presence. They typically cater to businesses with 25-250 employees and offer those clients private-cloud deployments, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and backup as a service (BUaaS).