Australian IT infrastructure services company S Central has acquired Rich Computing to expand its offerings into the health and financial services sectors.

The deal is the company's sixth acquisition in less than a year including the purchase of local IT vendor Express Apps and storage provider AGM IT.

S Central managing director Peter Mavridis said it targeted the Newcastle-based company to expand its security, storage and data management offerings across New South Wales.

"Rich Computing will add significant experience in security, storage and data management, and virtualisation technologies, '' Mavridis said.

"The company has a big presence in the NSW health and finance sectors, so the deal is another step to win larger corporate IT deals.''

Rich Computing has corporate and government clients, including the Hunter New England Area Health Service, across the health sector each with 500 to 7000 employees.

Rich Computing managing director Steve Rich said the company has several large clients in the financial sector and food industry.

"We have other customers such as large universities and a number of multinational mining and metals groups, and the country's largest electricity provider," Rich said.

"The company also has a long-standing relationship with Sanitarium Health Foods across its branch offices and distribution centres in Australia and New Zealand." S Central will inherit technologies from Citrix, Cisco, Altiris, Microsoft, VMware, and Trend Micro, built into the company's IT shop and delivered in managed and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models.

Rich Computing will continue to operate under its trading name, while the company's back-end systems will be merged into S Central.