AWS Partner Lemongrass Spices Up Azure Practice With WFT Acquisition

WFT CEO Ganesh Radhakrishnan has joined Lemongrass along with other WFT employees in the U.S. and the India-based delivery team.

Lemongrass, an Amazon Web Services partner that specializes in migrating SAP workloads to the cloud, has acquired Wharfedale Technologies, adding new specializations in SAP migration and management on Microsoft Azure.

The news follows the Atlanta-based Lemongrass’ previously announced plan to go multi-cloud, expanding beyond AWS to grow its Microsoft and Google Cloud practices organically and through acquisition.

Lemongrass – a member of CRN’s Elite 150 managed service providers – decided on Lawrenceville, N.J.-based Wharfedale Technologies (WFT) because it focused on SAP, worked primarily in the cloud and offered technical managed services, Lemongrass CEO Mike Rosenbloom told CRN in an interview.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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“Wharfedale is an advanced specialization partner on Azure, so specifically for their SAP on Azure specialization. So we now already have immediately inherited that designation of being an SAP advanced specialization partner on Azure – which there‘s very few of those,” Rosenbloom said.

WFT has also co-developed and co-engineered capabilities with Microsoft, Rosenbloom said. He’s interested in working more with Microsoft engineering on SAP-related functionality.

WFT was founded in 2000 by former technology partners and senior managers at Deloitte, IBM, HP and EMC, according to the company. WFT became the first SAP-certified cloud services provider in North America in 2010 and won the Microsoft MSUS Partner Award for Intelligent Cloud for SAP on Azure in 2018, 2019 and 2020.

“We think that it brings us additional immediate credibility, if you will, in the markets or reference ability – a set of customers who we could talk to to see are there things that we bring, additional capabilities that we have,” Rosenbloom said.

WFT CEO Ganesh Radhakrishnan has joined Lemongrass along with other WFT employees in the U.S. and the India-based delivery team, growing the Lemongrass headcount by about 5 percent, reaching about 500 employees, Rosenbloom said. Similar to Lemongrass, WFT is split between onshore and offshore.

The acquisition only represents about a third of Lemongrass’ new hyperscaler growth. Although Lemongrass is open to buying more companies, the rest of the growth will likely be organic through hiring and helping existing employees add skills, Rosenbloom said. Overall headcount should increase by about 25 percent this year.

Lemongrass is hiring more engineers with skills in automation and development operations (DevOps), he said.