ASI Solutions snaps up HCI superstar BEarena

ASI Solutions has acquired Sydney-based BEarena for an undisclosed sum.

BEarena has been in business since 2007, specialising in virtual infrastructure, public and hybrid cloud solutions, managed services and backup and disaster recovery platforms. The company has a reputation for spotting emerging technologies and taking new vendors to market, as shown by its early success with Veeam and Nutanix which it brought to the Australian market in 2009 and 2012 respectively.

BEarena’s two founders Darren Ashley and Kirstie Elderfield will move to ASI and expand their roles to work across the combined companies.

ASI said it will quickly integrate BEarena's Australian business, but its New Zealand operations will continue to operate independently under its own name from its Auckland and Wellington offices.

ASI managing director Nathan Lowe said BEarena has a long history of bringing enterprise vendors to ANZ, and its New Zealand presence in particular will allow it to expand its offerings across the ditch.

“The acquisition will give ASI access to additional enterprise businesses to grow our cloud services portfolio along with additional managed service growth and will give us the additional volume to provide scale to our product and managed services offerings,” said Lowe.

“We have made this acquisition because of BEarena’s team, relationships and market leader status. There are not too many organisations in Australia who have got the history in cloud like they do, and we plan to preserve and learn from BEarena’s knowledge and client relationships in the enterprise space.”

BEarena’s managing director Darren Ashley also weighed in, saying his company’s success comes down to selecting products that solve customer challenges “in a simple and cost-effective way, delivered by a team that has a maniacal drive for customer service and excellence.”

“Therefore, when working with partners we have always looked for the same qualities to guarantee the experience to our customers, and to complement our existing resources. In ASI we see all the same qualities, but at scale. This is key to BEarena’s existing customer base as our growth over the last thirteen years has generated a huge amount of opportunity, which we can now address with the ASI acquisition.”

“Further, our current customer base has almost no overlap, as with our catalogue of services meaning we can deliver more services to our existing and new clients with zero friction. All these factors clearly illustrated ASI as the perfect partner for BEarena, and both the management team and our customers are extremely excited for the future within the new group.”

BEarena is also a multi-time CRN Fast50 finalist, having been named co-winner of the Editor’s Award in 2016 after leading a series of transformative HCI and flash storage projects that year.

ASI’s last major acquisition came in October 2019 when it bought Canberra-based MSP Forward IT.