Salient Federal Solutions, Inc., yesterday said it has acquired ATS Corp., boosting its customer base in the federal civilian market for information technology solutions.

Salient paid $3.20 per share for ATS.

“Salient’s acquisition of ATSC is an important waypoint in the company’s strategy of very carefully targeting high-growth areas in the public sector market,” Brad Antle, Salient’s CEO, said in a statement. “It complements Salient’s strong position in the defense, homeland security, and intelligence sectors with existing business and opportunities in civilian agencies.”

With the acquisition Salient has created a new business unit, Civilian Mission Critical Solutions and established the Agile Software Center of Excellence as a way to bring its expertise in the defense, homeland security, intelligence and cyber domains to the federal civilian market. Salient also said it is establishing the System and Software Engineering Solutions business unit to leverage capabilities that ATSC has for agency-wide information technology infrastructure, cloud computing, and large scale systems integration.

ATSC had $91.4 million in sales last year, up 22 percent from 2010. Net income was $1.6 million and backlog stood at $276.9 million.

ATSC’s financial advisor on the deal was Sagent Advisors Inc.