European IT Services Provider Nortal Plans Major U.S. Expansion After Buying Dev9

With this week's acquisition of cloud-focused solution provider Dev9, Nortal, a large consultancy in Europe, is looking toward a major expansion of its U.S. operations.

Nortal, based in Estonia, had followed some clients into the U.S. market about a year ago. Dev9, an innovative Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud partner specializing in developing modern solutions for its clients, greatly bolsters the companies cloud expertise and American presence.

Financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

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The two solution providers met on a joint engagement—introduced to each other by an executive with the customer that noticed common threads as they worked on separate projects, said Matt Munson, CEO of Dev9.

"We immediately saw those similarities in our respective companies," Munson said. Slow discussions picked, and "by July we found it obvious this was a great match and greater partnership for both companies in order to scale."

Dev9, based in Kirkland, Wa, had grown organically for eight years a practice focused on cutting-edge cloud application development and deployment on AWS or Google.

That organic business model prevented the company from seizing opportunities at a greater scope and scale, Munson said. Merging with Nortal will give Dev9's team the opportunity to pursue larger engagements for more notable enterprises.

Nortal is a Microsoft Gold partner in Europe that does a lot of business in Scandinavian countries and the Middle East. The company is known for its business transformation services and deep industry expertise across commerce, health care and the public sector.

Since entering the U.S. market, Nortal has scaled rapidly to 40 specialists on this side of the Atlantic. But Nortal had never before focused much on cloud.

"We were looking for something complementary to our own offerings," said Oleg Shvaikovsky, president for Nortal LLC and executive vice president for Nortal Group. "What Dev9 is bringing to our family hits a competence that we didn't have before."

Dev9 will not only become "a foundation of our U.S. operations," he said, but Nortal will build a cloud practice in Europe "primarily with the help of experts at Dev9."

With the Dev9 acquisition, Nortal expects the U.S. to become the fastest-growing business in the company that will eventually scale to about a quarter of its overall operations, Shvaikovsky told CRN.

Nortal had already set up an office in the Bellevue area of Seattle. It will move those operations to Dev9's headquarters in neighboring Kirkland.

The combined company will have some 750 employees.