Exclusive: TLC IT buys Vigabyte's assets

Melbourne managed service provider TLC IT Group has bought the hosting assets of server hosting company Vigabyte for an undisclosed amount.

The deal will see TLC IT Group, ranked 24th in last year's CRN Fast50, gain control of Vigabyte's infrastructure and existing clients, the company, however, remains in the hands of Vigabyte founder Anoosh Manzoori. 

Alan Chapman, managing director for TLC IT (pictured), told CRN that discussions started six months ago following a long standing relationship with Vigabyte.

"We intimately know all their servers, they [Vigabyte] outsourced a lot of their operations, including the maintenance and running of their infrastructure, which is what we did.

"We know the business, we know all the back-end tech, we know what it runs on and we have all the skills to run it.

"Vigabyte was built on VMware, Sun, Juniper and an EMC infrastructure. That's all of our key partners so it fits very nicely with what we've got," said Chapman.

Chapman said the deal offers its clients "a point of difference" and opens up his business to new markets.

"By being able to offer servers in the cloud rather than buying a new server it gives us a huge point of difference and make us a lot more competitive. It's also better for our clients as well because they don't have to spend a lot of money on hardware.

"Technology is moving to the cloud now and if you're not in the cloud you'll be wiped out by the cloud. We don't want that to happen to us, we want to lead it," he added.

Chapman said last year that he planned to grow TLC IT by 40 percent. The acquisition represented 10 percent of that planned growth, said Chapman, and the business would continue to "actively grow the business through acquisition" this year.

Anoosh Manzoori, Vigabyte's founder and CEO, told CRN he would now focus on developing  web-based control panel software for virtualised environments.

The sale is not the first for Manzoori, who also founded Smartyhost, which he sold to MYOB in 2008 for $7 million.

Following that transaction, Manzoori was able to retain IP for a cloud computing platform as well as enterprise hosting infrastructure which formed Vigabyte.

"My focus was to develop software. We still had the infrastructure but it was managed by TLC IT. So about six months ago we started to engage because they were managing that infrastructure for us," said Manzoori.Update:

Chapman launched TLC IT in July 2001. It has since grown into an $8 million company with 42 employees.