Two AWS MSP Partners, Reliam And Stratalux, Merge To Bring Public Cloud Consulting To A Wider Market

Two Los Angeles-based Amazon Web Services MSP partners are joining forces to deepen their AWS expertise, and bringing public cloud strategy consulting to more business customers, the two companies said on Tuesday.

Reliam LLC, an MSP and consulting partner for public cloud services, including AWS and Microsoft Azure, has acquired Stratalux, a born-in-the-cloud MSP that focuses exclusively on AWS. Together, the freshly-merged MSPs will be better equipped to support businesses with 24/7 managed services for workloads running across global AWS environments, Reliam CEO Simon Anderson told CRN.

Both Reliam and Stratalux are AWS Consulting Partners and AWS MSP partners. The deal will strengthen Reliam's partnership with AWS as the MSP continues to grow its AWS business, elevating Reliam to AWS Premier Consulting Partner status this year, Anderson said.

[Related: Partners: New AWS Solution Provider Program Places More Value On Solution Selling, Not Reselling]

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed. The transaction was funded through an add-on investment made by Boston-based firm Great Hill Partners, which made an initial investment in Reliam in November 2017, according to Reliam.

Many mid-market and enterprise customers today view the public cloud as the right venue for their customer-facing and back office applications. As this palpable mindset shift has become more popular, Reliam decided to acquire more cloud expertise to help more customers manage and secure their public cloud environments.

"The sheer complexity of public cloud computing -- the number of choices that can be made by an application developer or company running propriety apps -- means there is a lack of in-house knowledge," Anderson said. "With the two companies together, we feel we have been able to add a lot of depth to our cloud and DevOps engineering [teams] and our solution architect teams here in Southern California."

Leveraging Stratalux's capabilities, Reliam will offer cloud strategy consulting services, as well as help with cloud migration, solution design, security and governance, cost optimization, and application performance management, the company said.

And with the Stratalux deal under its belt, Reliam is poised to go big with AWS, Anderson said.

"It's really based on customer demand," he said. "The vast majority of customers we interact with need cloud expertise, or are being introduced to us by the public cloud providers. The majority are looking to deploy or manage apps on AWS, and grow their footprint confidently."

Stratalux's entire team has joined Reliam, a company that now has about 60 employees. The MSP also has plans to continue to grow the company and expand into new geographies, Anderson said.

Together, the new Reliam will have more than 100 mid-market and enterprise customers across industries such as media and entertainment, mobile gaming, digital media, marketing, ecommerce, and software-as-a-service.

"We're actively working on some other opportunities that will add to our industry vertical strengths, as well as our geographic reach," he said.

Stratlux's CEO and founder Jeremy Przygode, will serve as the combined companies’ president of media and entertainment, and will become a member of the board of directors.