MTI details GSS acquisition

Following last month’s announcement that cloud infrastructure firm MTI has acquired IT security consultancy Global Secure Systems (GSS), MTI’s chief marketing officer, Aad Dekkers, has lifted the lid on the purchase.

Although MTI had already established itself in the storage market, it decided to make a move into the cloud infrastructure space. Explains Dekkers: “We had a strong storage background and a strong relationship with EMC [but] we decided to re-focus the company on cloud infrastructure to do more than archiving...investing in the datacentre and virtualisation with Cisco and VMware.”

With the move into the cloud, the firm was on the lookout for a security practice for its business. “Security is crucial in this environment, and there is a lot of opportunity to provide security – access or authentication, or identification or security management or assessments. It’s an opportunity for us to do a better job than what we do already,” says Dekkers.

“We have been talking to GSS for some time about buying the company,” explains Dekkers. “[It] is a good company; it is complementary from a technology and customer base.”

GSS will continue to operate under its own brand for the next couple of months, with MTI’s longer term plan of then fully integrating it under the its business, says Dekkers.

The total MTI business in Europe is $100m, with 200 employees including GSS. The firm operates in the upper half of the midmarket, pushing against enterprise. Dekkers cites finance as a market on the up again, but that most of MTI’s major wins come from public sector, education, local government, universities and healthcare.

Dekkers states that it’s too early to talk about potential changes to its channel relationships, and for now it’s “business as usual.”