Business Outsourcer Premier BPO Acquires dinCloud, A VDI And Cloud Services Provider

Premier BPO, a global business process outsourcing company, has acquired dinCloud, a cloud platform developer that's focused on the virtual desktop and cloud infrastructure market, the companies said Wednesday.

As part of the deal, which closed in January for an undisclosed price, Premier BPO's founder and CEO for nearly 15 years, Mark Briggs, also becomes CEO of dinCloud, which will remain an independent brand, said Ali Din, chief marketing officer at dinCloud.

The cloud platform provider based in Los Angeles has focused in recent years on bringing to market high-performance VDI and cloud infrastructure services through a rapidly growing channel.

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Premier BPO, based in Clarksville, Tenn., offers call center, IT support, back-office and billing services. The outsourcer will add dinCloud's platform capabilities, including its Desktop-as-a-Service products, to round out an extensive portfolio, Din told CRN.

Both companies were seeing a trend in the lower and midmarket, and to a smaller degree with enterprises, of companies wanting to consume on a subscription basis everything from phone services to human resources to IT.

"So now we crossed the entire spectrum," Din said, with dinCloud providing the infrastructure elements, and Premier BPO all the back office, accounting, HR, customer service and support, and lead generation.

"It basically covers all a company's functions, and makes them available as a monthly consumption-based service that can go up and down," Din said.

Briggs is someone who knows the channel well. Positions he held before launching Premier BPO include running the reseller division of Intelligent Electronics, and serving as CFO at distribution giant Ingram Micro.

"There’s tremendous affinity to the channel across the management team and the channel is our growth engine, so we intend to nurture it even more now," Din told CRN.

Several synergies became apparent after months of discussions between the leaders of both companies, Din said.

They had overlap in their base of customers as far as size, and verticals, specifically transportation and logistics, financial services and health care. And they also saw benefit in leveraging each other's capabilities.

DinCloud was fielding increasing demand from customers to provide more services, and Premier BPO had customers that wanted to keep their data within the U.S., and thought virtual desktops were a good way to provide that capability.

The pieces also fit well as far as management.

The cloud company didn't have a day-to-day CEO, and Briggs nicely filled that piece of the puzzle. At the same time, the business process outsourcer lacked a head of marketing, a position Din will now serve for both companies.

"Between that management team, we continue to run both companies separately in terms of the brands. But the management team oversees operations for both sides," he said.

DinCloud will further ramp its outreach to the channel with Premier BPO's increased resource capabilities, he said. The company will look to provide more hands-on support to partners.

"Our goal is to give more high touch and more customized joint-marketing with channel partners to take effect as early as next month," he said.