Sherpa Tools June 2 acquired smaller rival Omnetic to gain a West Coast office and team to bolster their Google Apps resale efforts.
Google Apps reseller Cloud Sherpas is expanding to the West Coast, thanks to an acquisition of smaller rival Omnetic.
Terms of the deal, announced June 2, were not made public.
Cloud Sherpas is the largest reseller of the Google Apps
cloud computing collaboration suite in the United States. The
Atlanta-based company has migrated more than 800,000 users from legacy
collaboration systems such as Microsoft Office
and IBM Lotus Notes and Domino to Google's suite of Web-based word
processing, spreadsheet and presentation apps.
Google currently sells
Google Apps for Business to
companies for $50 per user, per year. The company, whose cash is made mostly in
search advertising, also relies on a
fleet of authorized resellers, such as Cloud Sherpas, Appirio, LTech and
Omnetic, to help penetrate the broad and deep enterprise market.
To date, Cloud Sherpas has been reselling Google Apps
from its Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Austin, Chicago, New York and
Philadelphia
offices. However, the company lacked a West Coast presence to help add
to its recurring revenue streams culled from managed Apps seats in
nearly 300 customers.
Cloud Sherpas CEO Jon Hallett told eWEEK his team looked
around for the "dominant provide" and whose brand had the strongest
reputation in the market.
Omnetic, which has moved 100,000 users from legacy
systems to Google Apps, came out on top. The company's 10 employees will become
Cloud Sherpas employees, remaining in their San Francisco office.
This includes Omnetic founder and CEO Chris McGarry, who led
Salesforce.com's deployment of Google Apps and helped integrate Salesforce.com and Google Apps.
Hallett said the buy will help his company fortify relationships
with regional clients and prospects, and put Cloud Sherpas much closer to the
Google Apps partner team in Mountain View, Calif.
The acquirer will also gain some 30 customers, including
National Geographic, Dr. Martens, Mazda Raceway and the Schumacher Group.
Cloud Sherpas isn't just about reselling another company's software. The company expanded its purview from Apps reseller to IT
management provider with SherpaTools, an IT administration tool.
SherpaTools, which includes software modules that make Google
Apps for Business easier for administrators to provision to users, has been
installed for more than three million users worldwide.
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