In a move that will boost its effort to become a global multicloud MSP, Cloudreach is extending its U.S. footprint of modern software and business transformation experts with its acquisition of Relus Cloud.

Atlanta-based Relus is one of the largest Amazon Web Services (AWS) premier consulting partners in the southeastern U.S. The deal builds on Cloudreach’s existing expertise in AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud services.

The combined company now has 700 employees in eight countries and brings consulting and managed-services expertise focused on helping organizations transform their current application portfolios to cloud-native services based on modern software architectures. Cloudreach offers migration services and planning, and helps organizations shift to DevOps environments and modern software-development methodologies.

Cloudreach’s growth accelerated last year when private equity firm Blackstone Tactical Opportunities took a controlling interest in the company. Blackstone has given Cloudreach the financial resources to make other deals including Emerging Technology Advisers (ETA), which provides business-modernization services, and Cloudamize, a DevOps automation tool that provides assessment, migration planning and application deployment. In addition to using Cloudamize for its own customers, Cloudreach sells it to other MSPs.

“Increasingly we are seeing customers that are interested in containerization and microservices, and they are thinking about multicloud either now or for the future,” said Aaron Painter, who last month took over as CEO. “There’s a lot of demand by customers who want their software to be cloud-native — and that’s in our DNA.”

Aaron Painter

Aaron Painter

Painter said that Relus is a strong match in that regard.

“They also have a lot of expertise in the data space, data, analytics and applying machine-learning to their applications,” he added. “They had a lot of architects and core prepackaged product that we are excited to roll into our portfolio. We’ll be refreshing our product road map based on those capabilities.”

While he said the road map is to be announced at a later date, Painter said a key area of expertise, and demand for services, is around building modern cloud-based data-lake architectures and applying machine-learning technologies to them.

“Many customers have really large pools of data and they’re trying to figure out how to redo their data strategies in ways that let them use it better and apply insights from data,” he said.

The acquisition of Relus, which closed on Tuesday, also brings expertise in the area of applying machine learning to IoT-based applications. Many of its customers are large utility providers that often have millions of customer records and process live data streams from IoT-based endpoints.

“In the oil and gas space, they actually put edge nodes on drills and they are getting data back from those, so they can better assess where to dig for oil next,” Painter said.

While Relus also brings highly sought-after AWS expertise, Painter believes their developers will be able to work well in multicloud environments.

“A lot of them are well-versed in other platforms and we have our own partnerships with Google and Microsoft,” he said. “They are all AWS today, but they are excited to become multicloud like Cloudreach is today.”