Dr Aydin Kurt-Elli is on a high, on several levels.

The exuberant 38 year old has recently been awarded his private pilot's licence and can now be spotted at the controls of a microlight over the East Lothian countryside.

More often, though, he is to be found in Leith, where as chief operating officer of cloud computing and managed hosting company Pulsant he has recently experienced a quantum leap in the company's size and scope.

Pulsant emerged from the internet service provider EdNet, which was founded in 1995 by Kurt-Elli, with £10,000 investment from his father Mussy, a serial entrepreneur and company director. At the time he was still a medical student at the University of Edinburgh.

Renamed Lumison in 2004, Bridgepoint Development Capital acquired a majority stake in the growing company in 2010 and the following year it bought Blue-Square Data, based in Maidenhead and DediPower in Reading.

In March this year the three companies merged to become Pulsant, a move which saw Mark Howling, who had a history of growing businesses in the IT services industry, take over as CEO and Kurt-Elli move to being chief operating officer of a company which now has a turnover of £30 million.

This was a major escalation from the £7-8m turnover of the companies as separate entities and Pulsant is now embarking on a £24m investment programme backed by Bridgepoint which the company says should see it grow turnover to £50m by 2015.

"Bridgepoint were interested in us as part of a buy and build strategy," says Kurt-Elli. We came from an ISP (Internet Services Provider) heritage but we happened to own our own data centres both in Edinburgh and London so owning and managing our own assets was quite an important part of why they were interested – as well as all the other services we provided on top of that."

The acquisition in 2010 also gave Kurt-Elli the opportunity to offer his family members an exit as minority shareholders, including his father, through whom he has said he gained "decades of experience at a discount" and whose presence gave the company the clout to win larger contracts.

He is hugely optimistic about prospects for Pulsant. "We have been putting the businesses together since last year and in doing so it seemed to make sense not to retain any one of the three brands.

"They were businesses of roughly the same size but with strengths in different areas, so while all three owned data centre assets, all had a slightly different emphasis. Putting the the three of them together meant presenting the customer with the prospect of a fuller, wider portfolio of products."

On the day we spoke, it was announced that Mike Lynch, the founder of software firm Autonomy had left the company less than a year after it had been bought by Hewlett-Packard, highlighting the dissonances that can arise when a smaller, high growth company becomes part of a wider enterprise. This, says Kurt-Elli, has definitely not been the experience of Lumison/Pulsant.

The complementary cultures of the three companies has, he says, ensured a common cause. "The culture of the business was an important part of the acquisitions; all three had similar attitudes towards customers and customer service and that was already very well aligned. It made that part of the story much easier; three self-confident companies that were focused on customer service coming together.

"Mark Howling helped us focus on the fact that all of these businesses remained strong in their own right and that by bringing them together it made all of us stronger.

"As we have moved from being three separate businesses into something that is £30 million+ turnover and growing you have to put every ounce of energy into making sure that we do that while retaining the customer intimacy that these respective businesses were known for."

With a workforce of 130, 150,000 sq ft of data centre space across five locations in the UK, a presence in New York, Amsterdam and Hong Kong and some 3,000 customers, the need stay close to the them is, he says, paramount and he agrees that the tech-speak that plagues the IT sector is not helpful.

"Pulsant is focused around the mid market which allows for the degree of customer intimacy that they would expect. Yes, the language can be problematic and to make it worse a lot of companies in our sector use the same words to mean completely different things – but it's symptomatic of the speed of change in our industry because things are in flux. As both technology and the markets mature it will be come clearer over time what people really mean."

One area that is extremely voguish at the moment is the seemingly omnipresent "Cloud", which enables customers to access their software and files from anywhere that has an internet connection. It is an area that Pulsant is targeting, with a view to attracting larger clients, especially in financial services.

The current customer list is mid-market, he says, with well-established examples such as law firms Brodies and Turcan Connell to investment houses such as Seven Investment Management and Kames Capital, formerly Aegon. The company is again the official internet services provider for the Edinburgh International Festival, which last year received 600,000 visits by more than 450,000 unique visitors.

"We get business and provide hosting for parts of the NHS and Virgin.com, so there's a wide range of business but the common thread is serviceability and availability and it's all about the quality of what we achieve technically, aligned with – and I make no apology for using the phrase – customer intimacy."

It's an approach he learned, he says, in medicine. "I got into this game really because I have been a bit of a geek since I was about seven years old. I did practice medicine but I set the business up because I saw an opportunity, which has happened to succeed and grow very well.

"I applied a lot of what I'd learned in medicine in terms of the work ethic – search and replace 'patient' with 'customer' and it's pretty much the same technique – but I think the IT sector lacks a model for diagnostic as systemised and organised as medicine and what fascinates me is how we can learn from other sectors – like medicine – to improve that."

And the changed scale at Pulsant has not kept him away from the customer. "I get depressed when I'm not exposed to that side of things on a daily basis," he says.

"I'm in meetings with them all the time and long may that continue – that's basically why I went into this game and commitment to the customer will be the mark of whether we succeed or fail."

If Pulsant's success is a source of pride to Kurt-Elli, so is his family, and especially his seven-year-old daughter, who has just joined him for her first flight in a microlight. "She was the only one brave enough," he laughs. "And I was extremely proud of that." n