Now that someone with lower respect for embargoes has broken the news, there’s nothing stopping me from talking about the latest acquisition for US based Google Apps reseller Cloud Sherpas. Cloud Sherpas is a company I’ve written about before, they’ve got a smart approach towards being a reseller in the SaaS space – they’re building scale and security through two fronts;

  1. By productizing parts of what they do. Cloud Sherpas has developed the SherpaTools product
  2. By aggressively acquiring other Google aps resellers

As part of this second strategy Cloud Sherpas have been acquiring a number of US based Google Apps resellers and have just moved their sights further afield, having acquired New Zealand based Google Apps reseller WaveAdept. First a quick disclosure, I’m an unpaid adviser to WaveAdept and actually introduced Mike Cohn from Cloud Sherpas to Mike Riversdale rom WaveAdept a year or so ago – other than some intuition, I had no advance warning of this deal and won’t gain anything from it – this then is a simple case of a congratulations to the WaveAdept guys and a look at what it takes to build a channel business in the cloud.

Terms of the deal were not divulged – I’d be surprised if there was any real cash involved in the deal, rather Cloud Sherpas continues on its path to building a global brand and can now claim a presence not only in New Zealand, but one that an easily be transferred to Australia and further afield in APAC (WaveAdept consists of three people at his stage and primarily works in New Zealand – I’d expect both those things to change pretty rapidly).

In return, WaveAdept gets to avoid the tyranny that being a tiny player causes and can leverage the credibility of the global Cloud Sherpas brand.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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