UK-based cloud service provider Ancoris has acquired e-learning and Google Apps for business training firm Cloud Skills for an undisclosed sum.
According to Ancoris, the tie up will provide customers a single point of contact to move from legacy platforms such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, Novell Groupwise and most other mail-servers to Google Apps and Gmail. Cloud Skills was nominated as Google's first Referred Training Partner for the UK and Europe in 2009 and provides a full range of training courses, e-Learning tools and migration aids to help organisations transition their users to Google Apps.
Ancoris will now offer a comprehensive range of services including Google Apps licensing, deployment and migration services, infrastructure and administrator support and the Cloud Skills end-user training.
Combining the businesses will also enable further investment in the development of the Cloud Skills Academy, an e-learning and e-support platform for Google Apps, available through the Google Apps Marketplace. The Cloud Skills Academy helps end-users to become productive quickly with Google Apps and to stay up to date with the latest features.
“Our Google Apps Transition Training programme fills a gap in the market by helping their employees transfer their skills to adopt a new way of working,” said Cloud Skills Director of e-learning development, Sue Fabre.
“We have worked closely with Ancoris to transition customers from traditional desktop applications to Google Apps for over three years. As a single business we accelerate our development of new innovative tools.”
Ancoris Managing Director, David McLeman said that combining Cloud Skill’s change management and training with his firm’s deployment and migration expertise was “a key contributor to the success of our largest deployments”.
“Our customers were able to speed up the adoption of Google Apps by their end users and minimise disruption to their business,” he said.