Vodafone has this morning announced the acquisition of Bluefish Communications Ltd, a fast-growing Reading-based consulting firm. Terms of the deal are not disclosed, but naturally we’re talking something akin to loose change for a giant with a turnover of £50bn.
Bluefish works on IT, network and comms design and implementation, with a particular focus on unified communications. It also does some resourcing (i.e. supplying skilled people) and hosts managed services for some clients, but first and foremost it’s a consulting house.
On the surface of things it’s the unified communications expertise that most interests Vodafone. Sitting within Vodafone Global Enterprise, the role of Bluefish’s 250 employees will be to help large businesses see the possibilities for UC and collaboration offerings such as Vodafone One.
So if, like many HotViews readers, you work for an IT services firm and you are not currently competing with Vodafone, I wouldn’t be too worried about today’s announcement heralding the arrival of one of the UK’s biggest and best resourced multi-nationals in your backyard. However, you have to wonder whether Vodafone, with its huge base of business customers, will start to use the opportunities afforded by the move to cloud to increase its exposure to areas like enterprise hosting and apps provision. If it does, the sort of expertise it’s acquiring via Bluefish can only be a bonus. In any case, we will be talking to Vodafone about their ambitions as part of our infrastructure services work in the coming months, so watch this space…