Nexon Asia Pacific acquires Blue Central

Nexon Asia Pacific has acquired Sydney managed services provider Blue Central from IPMG for an undisclosed amount.

The acquisition was finalised in late December.

Blue Central's former owner, print and digital services firm IPMG, is in merger talks with commercial printer PMP, a deal currently being reviewed by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

Founded in 1996, Blue Central provides a range of managed IT and cloud services, including infrastructure-as-a-service, hosting and migrations. The company boasts high-profile Australian customers such as Tigerair and the Sydney-Hobart Yacht Race.

Headquartered in Sydney, Nexon also provides managed IT and cloud services, specialising in unified communications, particularly hosted Skype for Business.

Nexon has been on the lookout for possible acquisition targets to scale its business and broaden its skillset to compete in the IT services market. In 2013, Nexon began branching out by acquiring ERP provider Praxa for an undisclosed amount.

Blue Central will operate under its own brand in the meantime while the two companies continue the integration process over the next few months. Blue Central staff will also move into Nexon's officer in Sydney's inner-west.

Blue Central managing director Peter Ikladios will remain as a "senior member" of the combined organisation's leadership team. Ikladios was appointed as managing director just six months ago when his company, Sydney managed services provider VCPro, was acquired by Blue Central in June 2016.

VCPro director Richard Youssef left after the acquisition and has recently joined Deloitte Australia as director of cloud and infrastructure solutions.

Nexon managing director Barry Assaf said the acquisition would help clients compete in the digitally disrupted and competitive marketplace.

"Whilst we continue to drive innovation balanced with reliability, accountability and responsiveness to our clients, the combination of our solutions offerings such as Nexon Absolute, Nexon Agile Business Cloud and our intelligent business applications offerings, skillsets and expertise with Blue Central will extend our collective capabilities and capacity, widen partnerships with industry-leading technology vendors and offer clients access to a wider reach of forward-thinking business technology solutions developed specially for their industry needs,” he said.