K3 Hosting acquires Willow Starcom for £1.75m
K3 is now able to service both enterprise level and SME businesses across a variety of sectors, with solutions for both hosted and on premise environments
Managed hosting provider K3 Hosting has significantly enhanced its on-premise and hosting capabilities after acquiring Willow Starcom in a £1.75 million deal.
The deal has enabled K3 Hosting to extend its existing portfolio of services to include on-premise design, implementation and support of IT systems, complementing its hosting and managed services offering.
The company is now able to service both enterprise level and SME businesses across a variety of sectors, with solutions being built to exact specifications for both hosted and on premise environments.
As part of the agreement, K3 Hosting has inherited the entire workforce from Willow Starcom, together with its stable of 240 customers, which come from a variety of different industries, giving K3 Hosting a customer base of over 300. The businesses will be merged and rebranded together in Willow Starcom’s existing offices in Wigan, along with K3 Hosting’s existing Edinburgh operation.
Neil Farnworth, managing director at K3 Hosting, said: “K3 Hosting already has expertise in providing hosted solutions that deliver entire platform infrastructures for customers deploying the Microsoft Dynamics AX, NAV and CRM products as well as SYSPRO.
“Willow Starcom is a well-established business with a very mature on premise support and implementation team. This acquisition means that we will now be able to expand our services to deploy mission critical IT applications using Willow Starcom’s specialist implementation team.”
K3’s enterprise class infrastructure previously meant that it was best suited to support larger businesses, but with the additional hosting capabilities that Willow Starcom has brought to K3 Hosting, it can now offer a service to smaller SMEs as well, Farnworth added.