GMT, VSS sell IT-Ernity to trade

GMT made the original investment from its third fund, a €250m buyout vehicle that held a final close in July 2007 and was 86% invested by December 2011, according to Unquote Data.  

The third fund was restructured in a GP-led transaction in April 2017, with Park Hill Group advising. IT-Ernity was transferred into the Guernsey-registered GMT Realisation Fund along with MeetingZone and Primesight to give GMT longer to realise the assets. 

Approximately 80% of the LPs sold their stakes to Newbury Partners, Altamar Capital Partners and Montana Capital Partners for around €120m. GMT Communications Partners III is understood to have returned more than 2x money to its original LPs. MeetingZone has since been sold to trade buyer LoopUp Group for a cash consideration of £61.4m, leaving Primesight as the last asset in the fund after the sale of IT-Ernity.  

Trans-IP has wholly acquired the business from GMT and VSS to strengthen its hosting offering in the Benelux market. Trans-IP was previously owned by EQT, which acquired the company through its Mid Market and Mid Market Europe funds in August 2016, and sold it back to management in September 2017.

IT-Ernity has made 14 acquisitions since 2008, including two since the 2013 buyout. GMT and VSS supported the bolt-on of cloud software infrastructure provider CloudVPS, and voice-over-internet-protocol company Signet.

Previous funding
GMT and VSS acquired IT-Ernity from Nedvest Capital in May 2013. The management team also committed capital to the transaction, which was supported by debt financing from ING and ABN Amro.

Company
Founded in 2002, IT-Ernity provides a range of fully managed IT services, including system administration, protection, security, application management and outsourcing. Its clients are SMEs in the Netherlands. The firm offers shared hosting, domain registration and secure infrastructure connectivity through xDSL and fibre optics.

People
GMT Communications Partners – Timothy Green (managing partner).
Veronis Suhler Stevenson – Patrick Turner (managing director).
Trans-IP – Jeroen Hüpscher (CEO).
IT-Ernity – Chris de Jongh (CEO).

Advisers
Vendor – Arma Partners (corporate finance); Goodwin Procter (legal); Van Campen Liem (legal).

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• Topics
• Exits
• Benelux
• Technology
• GMT Communications Partners
• Trade sale
• Netherlands