Ensono Acquires Amido In Cloud-native App Development Play

‘[Cloud-native application development] is completely new for us. We do IaaS, a little PaaS. But Amido is cloud-native. They do AI, machine learning, data lakes, all the capabilities that sit on top of what we do. With the acquisition, we’re moving up the stack to the application now,’ says Larry Goldberg, Ensono’s senior vice president for global advisory and consulting services.

Global solution provider Ensono on Wednesday unveiled the acquisition of a developer of cloud-native applications, a move it says gives it the ability to work with clients across the entire cloud stack.

Ensono’s acquisition of London-based Amido brings the Downers Grove, Ill.-based solution provider a profitable cloud-native software engineering firm with about 130 people, said Larry Goldberg, Ensono’s senior vice president for global advisory and consulting services.

“Amido is focused on cloud-native application development,” Goldberg told CRN. “They’re taking customers’ business problems and creating new applications using microservices and other tools on Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform.”

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Prior to the acquisition, Ensono, which is ranked no. 94 on CRN’s 2020 Solution Provider 500, did not have a cloud-native application development capability, Goldberg said.

“This is completely new for us,” he said. “We do IaaS, a little PaaS. But Amido is cloud-native. They do AI, machine learning, data lakes, all the capabilities that sit on top of what we do. With the acquisition, we’re moving up the stack to the application now. We can now start at the top and move down the entire stack.”

Goldberg declined to disclose the value of the acquisition, but did say Amido was a profitable company.

About 20 percent of Ensono’s business is in Europe, and Amido is slated to continue as an independent consultancy there, Goldberg said.

“In parallel, we will be building client-facing elements in the U.S. for cloud-native application development,” he said. “By the fourth quarter, we will have limited services rolled out in the U.S., with full services available next year.”

Ensono’s acquisition of Amido is not the two companies’ first time working with each other, Goldberg said. “We’ve worked with Amido for a few years, so this is not a blind date,” he said.

Ensono was founded in 2016 when it was spun out of Chicago-based Acxiom as a standalone company. Several of the company’s executives including CEO Jeff VonDeylen came from Savvis, the hosting services business for CenturyLink.

Amido is Ensono’s fourth acquisition since its founding.

Ensono in 2018 acquired Wipro’s data center services business in a $405-million deal that included Wipro-s mainframe-focused managed services.

Ensono in 2016 acquired U.K.-based Attenda, a cloud platform providers with a focus on VMware, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. That was followed a year later with the acquisition of Inframon, a U.K.-based cloud transformation company.

Ensono, which had 2020 revenue of $650 million, is what Goldberg termed a “hybrid IT MSP.”

“We’re ‘hybrid’ in that we provide mainframe, midrange system, private cloud, and public cloud infrastructure,” he said. “We design, build, and optimize services across each platform. And we do each well. We’re not paper-thin in any of them.”