Blackstone Acquires a Majority Stake in Leading Global Public Cloud Enabler Cloudreach

London and New York, – Blackstone (NYSE: BX) today announced that funds managed by Blackstone, have acquired a majority share in Cloudreach, a leading global cloud enabler headquartered in London. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Viral Patel, Managing Director at Blackstone, said: “We are excited to partner with this innovative company and strong management team to help it expand moving forward. By combining Blackstone’s patient capital and Cloudreach’s industry-leading services, we see a significant opportunity to ignite dramatic growth in this business in the years ahead.”

“For companies and leaders to survive and prosper in this era of disruptive tech and accelerating pace of change, they must create an organization that can adapt quickly and move efficiently from their legacy businesses and business models to new ones, “ said Dave Johnson, a Senior Advisor to Blackstone. “Public cloud provides the agility needed to migrate a company’s underlying business processes that is paramount to sustaining competitiveness.”

Cloudreach is a “born-in-the-cloud” enabler, and operations business that provides expert products and services for mid-market and large enterprises, in their journey to adopt public cloud. With offices across seven countries, Cloudreach is the only cloud-native company with significant presence in both Europe and North America. Their agile approach to business transformation is underpinned by deep expertise and experience in enabling, integrating and operating cloud technologies for some of the world’s largest organizations, including BP, Pearson and Hearst.

“Cloudreach has been a strategic partner for Hearst from architectural planning through rollout and beyond. As our needs have expanded, so has their commitment to supporting our business,” said Philip Wiser, CTO of Hearst, about their relationship with Cloudreach.

“Since our inception in 2009, we have gone on to build the leading global cloud services company that is valued by its customers for the way in which we accelerate their success with adopting cloud technologies” said Pontus Noren, co-founder of Cloudreach.  “This investment by Blackstone will allow us to continue to expand our geographic reach, our software development capabilities, and further automate and expand our managed services / cloud operations capabilities. The focus is to enable our customers to innovate at pace and adapt their business to today’s IoT, AI and digitally driven world.”

Pontus Noren, a co-founder of Cloudreach, will become its CEO and Dave Johnson, a Senior Advisor to Blackstone, will become the Chairman of the Board of Directors. 

“The Public Cloud services market is expected to grow into a $236 billion industry by 2020 according to Forrester. Additionally, Bain & Company estimates that 60% of all IT growth will be related to the cloud in the coming years and that while early adopters fueled the first waves of cloud adoption they are now being joined and overtaken by larger and more mainstream customers who are as likely to use new providers as they are their incumbents. We are entering into this industry at a key inflection point and will seek to make additional investments to accelerate and expand Cloudreach’s capabilities,” added Johnson.

Arma Partners advised Cloudreach on the transaction.

About Blackstone
Blackstone is one of the world’s leading investment firms. We seek to create positive economic impact and long-term value for our investors, the companies we invest in, and the communities in which we work. We do this by using extraordinary people and flexible capital to help companies solve problems. Our asset management businesses, with over $360 billion in assets under management, include investment vehicles focused on private equity, real estate, public debt and equity, non-investment grade credit, real assets and secondary funds, all on a global basis. Further information is available at www.blackstone.com. Follow Blackstone on Twitter @Blackstone.

About Cloudreach
Cloudreach is a renowned cloud-native global cloud enabler. In 2012, we were the first company in the world to move a true enterprise datacenter to AWS, for Kempinski Hotels. Cloudreach believe tomorrow’s leaders will be those who take advantage of cloud technologies to beat the competition. Our mission is to enable this outcome through intelligent and innovative cloud adoption by providing capabilities to enable, integrate and operate cloud platforms. Our primary cloud platform partners are AWS, Microsoft and Salesforce, whose cloud platforms underpin everything we do. Our customers are mainly enterprises with $1Bn+ in revenue looking to transform their business using cloud technologies. Visit www.cloudreach.com or follow us on Twitter @Cloudreach.

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