Atos’s offer to acquire servers and services specialist Bull has been approved, making it possible for the company to beef up its security and cloud computing offerings.
The French IT services company announced a €620 million (US$830 million) bid for Bull at the end of May.
The deal required Atos to acquire 50 percent plus one share of Bull’s equity, and that condition has been met, Atos said Monday. It will hold 84.25 percent of Bull’s share capital and voting rights and 18.4 percent of the convertible bonds in circulation by a settlement date set for next Monday, the company said.
With the approval out of the way, Atos can get on with the integration work. The goal of the acquisition is to take advantage of Bull’s know-how in sectors such as cloud operations, security and big data.
Additionally, Bull is a well-known vendor of supercomputers. The company had 17 entries in the June edition of the Top500 supercomputing list. However, Atos’s ambitions for its high performance computing business goes beyond simply building supercomputers: the company plans to draw on Bull’s expertise to boost the aforementioned cloud and big data services.
The deal will also enhance Atos’ offerings for the manufacturing, healthcare, and public sectors, and will reinforce its footprint, mainly in France but also in other parts of the world such as Poland, Africa and Brazil, Atos said.
Bull isn’t the only company Atos has acquired recently. In June, it bought Swiss IT consulting firm Cambridge Technology Partners. The goal with that deal is to strengthen its digital marketing expertise in the consumer goods, pharmaceutical and financial sectors, it said at the time.