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Six Degrees Group Announces Acquisition of Ultraspeed

Six Degrees Group has announced that it has completed the acquisition of Ultraspeed, a London-based managed hosting and managed cloud provider. Ultraspeed was founded in 1998 and serves a variety of FTSE 250 companies, charities and digital media customers, including Nando’s, British Heart Foundation, John Brown Media Group and Bon Voyage Travel & Tours.

Ultraspeed is a pure-play managed hosting business that will be integrated into Six Degrees Group’s managed data division. Ultraspeed has an average customer spend of £25,000 per annum, positioning it strongly into the mid-market that is the focus for Six Degrees Group. Most of Ultraspeed’s revenues derive from Private Cloud Services with the remaining being a blend of dedicated server and shared cloud server hosting. Ultraspeed’s team, which has deep expertise in the managed and cloud hosting sector is highly complementary to the Six Degrees Group’s cloud offering.

Alastair Mills, CEO of Six Degrees Group, stated, “I am delighted to bring Ultraspeed into Six Degrees Group. Our 2012 strategy is very clearly focused on expanding our managed hosting and cloud capabilities and this acquisition marks a significant move in that direction. Ultraspeed brings advanced technologies to the Group and a talented team of people with superb hosting know-how. In addition, their customer base is in our mid-market sweet-spot and they boast a strong presence in the digital media sector that is a key industry for Six Degrees Group. Forrester Research predicts that cloud services will grow at 27% CAGR and our current performance comfortably exceeds that level. With more investments in hosting and cloud to follow, I am confident that we are well-positioned to be the fastest growing and most admired managed data services company in the UK mid-market.”

In response, Jordan Gross, CEO of Ultraspeed, commented, “This is an exciting development for Ultraspeed’s employees and customers. We have built a very strong business focused on managed hosting and cloud services. I decided that it was right for Ultraspeed to join Six Degrees Group as that will allow us to add strong network and datacentre offerings to our proposition, along with converged services, giving us a strong end-to-end capability. We’ll also have greater financial strength and a broader technology platform allowing us to continue to target larger companies in the mid-market space.”