Managed data services business Six Degrees Group has continued with its acquisition strategy by acquiring complementary UK companies.

Founder Alastair Mills set up the company after selling his previous venture, SpiriTel, to AIM-listed communications business Daisy Group for £27 million. Six Degrees was established through the acquisitions of data centre provider UKSolutions, technology business NetworkFlow and voice player Protel. Prior to its foundation Six Degrees raised £60 million of funding.

Its new acquisitions are for two London-based managed hosting and cloud providers, Firstserv and Serverstream. Both companies are ten years old and focus on the digital media sector of managed hosting and have customers including The Spectator and Port of London Authority.

Following the deals, which takes its cloud M&A count up to three, both Firstserv and Serverstream will be integrated into Six Degrees’ managed data division and will provide a reported £3 million in hosting revenues.

Mills, CEO of Six Degrees, says that the company’s goal for 2012 is to become one of the top five hosting and cloud providers in the UK.

Gordon Kenneway, managing director of Firstserv, comments, ‘Our employees will now have access to a larger, geographically diverse hosting platform with best-in-class compute and storage resources, which is also a very exciting step for our customers.’

Back at its launch in October, Six Degrees and Mills said it wanted to capitalise on what it believes is a ‘tipping point’ in technology, with its research showing that workers see their own personal technology as better than that provided by employers.

However, Mills believes that UK plc is still stuck in the 1990s, with many employers ‘disabling and controlling’ when they should be ‘enabling and empowering’.