Guardian IT Plc, the UK-based disaster recovery specialist, has agreed to pay the equivalent of 5m pounds ($8.1m) to acquire three French businesses from Louisville, Kentucky-based Strategia Corp.
The cash deal, which hinges on approval from Strategia’s stockholders, will give Guardian IT control of Twinsys Dataguard SA and Twin-X SA, which together provide disaster recovery services at a data center in Paris for more than 70 customers on Bull, IBM, HP and Sun platforms. Guardian is also taking over Strategia Europe SAS, a technical support and consultancy company but it denied that this signaled a general diversification for the company.
Strategia president Richard Smith justified the sale of the businesses by arguing that there has been a great deal of consolidation in the European disaster recovery market and this would have made competition more difficult against the resulting larger players.
The acquisition gives Guardian IT around 20% of the French disaster recovery market. The company claims to be number one in the UK, number three in Germany and the largest operator in Scandinavia.
