Bulletproof adds $4m in sales and 100 clients with buyout

Hosting provider Bulletproof has acquired Sydney consulting firm Pantha Corp for $3.9 million.

Bulletproof announced to the ASX on Thursday that an initial payment of $800,000 had been paid to Pantha, and a further $3.1 million is payable by June 2016 as an equal mixture of cash and shares, contingent on performance.

Pantha Corp, based in Manly on the northern beaches of Sydney, is an Agile and DevOps cloud specialist that adds around $4 million of annual revenue to Bulletproof's books. The acquisition is expected to bring 100 new customers per year, according to the ASX announcement.

The buyout of the AWS partner instantly adds a professional services arm to managed services-dominant Bulletproof. Currently the company's consulting team only has "one or two" staff assigned to it.

"[The small team] was really just a seed to bring pre-sales capability and to do some project management," Bulletproof chief Anthony Woodward told CRN. "But now Pantha will bring across 20 people to the consulting team, and they will report to [Pantha CEO] Bjoern Schliebitz."

Co-founders Schliebitz and Agnes Schliebitz-Ponthus will lead Bulletproof's professional services and product development teams respectively. One of the performance conditions for the full payout is the release of new products.

According to LinkedIn, Schliebitz was an early staff member of Amazon Germany, and also served a stint at Amazon US as a software development manager.

Woodward said that Bulletproof had long been seeking this type of opportunity.

"We've been talking about this for a little while… we have customers who'd like to continue their cloud journey with more application workloads, but do not have the resources to work out which apps to move and how to get there," he said.

The transaction will see Bulletproof almost nudge triple figures in head count.

In August, CRN reported that the publicly listed company had bumped up its revenue by 29 percent on the back of its partnership with Amazon Web Services. Bulletproof is currently one of only six Australian companies in the AWS Managed Services Program, along with ITOC, Melbourne IT, CloudHouse, Base 2 Services and SMS Management and Technology.

Bulletproof is headquartered in Sydney with branches in Melbourne and San Jose, USA.