City Network today announced its purchase of 100% of the shares in Fragnet. City Network is a leading European provider of robust, global open infrastructure services and Fragnet is a Swedish online gaming hosting provider. Fragnet specializes in delivering hosting services to the gaming industry via 27 dedicated data centers worldwide and have a strong position in Asia. The acquisition strengthens City Network’s geographical reach and provides new and well established connection points for many of the company´s services, such as their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), networking services and compliant clouds. City Network also gains a strong foothold in the gaming industry which is a growth industry when it comes to use of cloud-based infrastructure.
“Fragnet enables us to strengthen our position nationally and internationally,” says Johan Christenson, City Network’s founder and CEO. “The company’s global reach is a key part of our continued expansion strategy to offer OpenStack-based IT-infrastructure services to the enterprise market. In addition, gaming is a growth industry that offers many business opportunities.”
Like City Network, Fragnet is based in Karlskrona, Sweden. The company currently hosts game servers for a number of games such as Battlefield, DayZ, and Minecraft. Fragnet employs six people with a 2014 reported sales of SEK 10 million. Fragnet’s operations will now be integrated into City Network, and all employees and customers will accompany the acquisition. Fragnet will become a business division within City Network managed by Daniel Öhberg, Fragnet’s former owner and CEO.
“With City Network, Fragnet gets a powerful owner that enables further development of our customer proposition,” says Daniel Öhberg, incoming City Network business division manager. “I very much look forward to continuing to develop our service in the global arena.”
In 2015, City Network enforced its efforts to the enterprise market by launching services such as City Cloud for Banking & Finance, City Connect, and Desktop as a Service. The company also established operations on the US market. An number of strategic recruitments has further enhanced the investments towards large enterprises. The Fragnet acquisition further fortifies these offerings via increased global presence and new verticals.
“With Fragnet as part of City Network, we continue our journey towards becoming the leading, independent, cloud-based IT infrastructure provider, inside and outside Sweden,” says Christenson. “For quite some time now, the gaming industry has been one of the driving verticals for cloud-based infrastructure. Companies in other industries often refer to these solutions as they strive to enable flexible, cost-efficient infrastructures.”