Category Archives for "Managed Services News"

Minnesota channel partner Renodis is using M&A to ramp up its competencies in 5G, hospitality and utilities, among other growth areas.

The St. Paul-based telecom and mobility management provider wrapped its fifth acquisition last week in the form of Eric Ryan Corporation. The 20-year-old company’s inorganic growth strategy first started in 2018 but has ramped up in 2022. The agency is planning to announce two more deals by the end of the year.

Renodis’ Craig Beason

“We don’t want to grow faster than we can handle,” Renodis CEO Craig Beason told Channel Futures. “We’ve got our eyes set on getting over $100 million dollars in top line revenue with a healthy EBITA to the bottom, and I think we have a good plan,”

Background

Beason founded the agency in 2002.  At the time he held no telecom experience, other than working in a carrier’s HR division. Nevertheless, Beason said he saw an opportunity to build a telecom service model. As he saw it, business customers would benefit from someone managing their POTS lines from install to end-of-life.

Twenty years ago telecom centered around frame relay, before MPLS came into the picture.

“Telecom’s not a sexy space for enterprise clients. It’s kind of a means to the ends – the janitorial component. I felt at the time that there was a message around building and managing the lifestyle stack of the services,” Beason said. “I felt like enterprises didn’t do a great job with it. Carriers didn’t do a good job supporting it. I thought that the enterprise market would pay to have an expert come in to manage the life cycle, as well as the advisory services that go with that.”

Life Cycle Management

More and more agents brand themselves as holistic providers of technology services. That means expanding beyond vendor sourcing to walking the client through the entire life of the technology. Beason said Renodis was one of the first firms to take this approach.

“I’ve always said that this is where it’s going to go. The customers and the carriers are going to require agents to do more than brokering the services. There’s a lot of value in brokering the services. But unfortunately, as the market and the climate get that much more competitive, you’ve got to be able to offer more value-added services around it,” he said.

However, building such a practice doesn’t occur overnight, Beason said.

“I can build a website overnight and say I do it, but it’s a lot more involved than just working off a spreadsheet. If you’re doing a small client and bill $50,000 a month, maybe you could pull it off. But when you get to the enterprise, they’re looking for just a different level of tool sets and products,” he said.

Beason and his team built the practice from the ground up. He was a newly married young man when he started Renodis. His pregnant wife had recently taken voluntary severance. Cash was scarce. Growth came slowly but surely.

“Every year, every extra dollar went right back into building out products, tools and hiring people to be able to slowly morph into that outsourced model,” he said.

Beason said Renodis spent 2009 to 2013 building its in-house technology to enable itself to fully manage telecom. At the end of that stretch, a CIO approached them about the offering. The CIO wanted to help Renodis make the platform “enterprise-ready.” Moreover, they wanted to become…

As we face into the winds of Q4, M&A activity appears to still be hot, despite whispers of a slowdown. 

Private equity firms and other investors are seeing the value of the channel like never before. Indeed, 2021 was the most active year for M&A in the history of such transactions. 2022 was no exception. 

However, it will be interesting to see what happens as organizations analyze their businesses headed into 2023. Will mergers and acquisitions continue to flourish? Or will providers pump the brakes?

Deals over the last few months have spanned the gamut, from names like Valeo and Magna5 to players such as GoodSuite and GoTo.

Scroll through the images above to see a sampling of the latest mergers and acquisitions and investment deals in the IT/MSP channel in 2022.

Minnesota channel partner Renodis is using M&A to ramp up its competencies in 5G, hospitality and utilities, among other growth areas.

The St. Paul-based telecom and mobility management provider wrapped its fifth acquisition last week in the form of Eric Ryan Corporation. The 20-year-old company’s inorganic growth strategy first started in 2018 but has ramped up in 2022. The agency is planning to announce two more deals by the end of the year.

Renodis’ Craig Beason

“We don’t want to grow faster than we can handle,” Renodis CEO Craig Beason told Channel Futures. “We’ve got our eyes set on getting over $100 million dollars in top line revenue with a healthy EBITA to the bottom, and I think we have a good plan,”

Background

Beason founded the agency in 2002.  At the time he held no telecom experience, other than working in a carrier’s HR division. Nevertheless, Beason said he saw an opportunity to build a telecom service model. As he saw it, business customers would benefit from someone managing their POTS lines from install to end-of-life.

Twenty years ago telecom centered around frame relay, before MPLS came into the picture.

“Telecom’s not a sexy space for enterprise clients. It’s kind of a means to the ends – the janitorial component. I felt at the time that there was a message around building and managing the lifestyle stack of the services,” Beason said. “I felt like enterprises didn’t do a great job with it. Carriers didn’t do a good job supporting it. I thought that the enterprise market would pay to have an expert come in to manage the life cycle, as well as the advisory services that go with that.”

Life Cycle Management

More and more agents brand themselves as holistic providers of technology services. That means expanding beyond vendor sourcing to walking the client through the entire life of the technology. Beason said Renodis was one of the first firms to take this approach.

“I’ve always said that this is where it’s going to go. The customers and the carriers are going to require agents to do more than brokering the services. There’s a lot of value in brokering the services. But unfortunately, as the market and the climate get that much more competitive, you’ve got to be able to offer more value-added services around it,” he said.

However, building such a practice doesn’t occur overnight, Beason said.

“I can build a website overnight and say I do it, but it’s a lot more involved than just working off a spreadsheet. If you’re doing a small client and bill $50,000 a month, maybe you could pull it off. But when you get to the enterprise, they’re looking for just a different level of tool sets and products,” he said.

Beason and his team built the practice from the ground up. He was a newly married young man when he started Renodis. His pregnant wife had recently taken voluntary severance. Cash was scarce. Growth came slowly but surely.

“Every year, every extra dollar went right back into building out products, tools and hiring people to be able to slowly morph into that outsourced model,” he said.

Beason said Renodis spent 2009 to 2013 building its in-house technology to enable itself to fully manage telecom. At the end of that stretch, a CIO approached them about the offering. The CIO wanted to help Renodis make the platform “enterprise-ready.” Moreover, they wanted to become…

As we face into the winds of Q4, M&A activity appears to still be hot, despite whispers of a slowdown. 

Private equity firms and other investors are seeing the value of the channel like never before. Indeed, 2021 was the most active year for M&A in the history of such transactions. 2022 was no exception. 

However, it will be interesting to see what happens as organizations analyze their businesses headed into 2023. Will mergers and acquisitions continue to flourish? Or will providers pump the brakes?

Deals over the last few months have spanned the gamut, from names like Valeo and Magna5 to players such as GoodSuite and GoTo.

Scroll through the images above to see a sampling of the latest mergers and acquisitions and investment deals in the IT/MSP channel in 2022.

Minnesota channel partner Renodis is using M&A to ramp up its competencies in 5G, hospitality and utilities, among other growth areas.

The St. Paul-based telecom and mobility management provider wrapped its fifth acquisition last week in the form of Eric Ryan Corporation. The 20-year-old company’s inorganic growth strategy first started in 2018 but has ramped up in 2022. The agency is planning to announce two more deals by the end of the year.

Renodis’ Craig Beason

“We don’t want to grow faster than we can handle,” Renodis CEO Craig Beason told Channel Futures. “We’ve got our eyes set on getting over $100 million dollars in top line revenue with a healthy EBITA to the bottom, and I think we have a good plan,”

Background

Beason founded the agency in 2002.  At the time he held no telecom experience, other than working in a carrier’s HR division. Nevertheless, Beason said he saw an opportunity to build a telecom service model. As he saw it, business customers would benefit from someone managing their POTS lines from install to end-of-life.

Twenty years ago telecom centered around frame relay, before MPLS came into the picture.

“Telecom’s not a sexy space for enterprise clients. It’s kind of a means to the ends – the janitorial component. I felt at the time that there was a message around building and managing the lifestyle stack of the services,” Beason said. “I felt like enterprises didn’t do a great job with it. Carriers didn’t do a good job supporting it. I thought that the enterprise market would pay to have an expert come in to manage the life cycle, as well as the advisory services that go with that.”

Life Cycle Management

More and more agents brand themselves as holistic providers of technology services. That means expanding beyond vendor sourcing to walking the client through the entire life of the technology. Beason said Renodis was one of the first firms to take this approach.

“I’ve always said that this is where it’s going to go. The customers and the carriers are going to require agents to do more than brokering the services. There’s a lot of value in brokering the services. But unfortunately, as the market and the climate get that much more competitive, you’ve got to be able to offer more value-added services around it,” he said.

However, building such a practice doesn’t occur overnight, Beason said.

“I can build a website overnight and say I do it, but it’s a lot more involved than just working off a spreadsheet. If you’re doing a small client and bill $50,000 a month, maybe you could pull it off. But when you get to the enterprise, they’re looking for just a different level of tool sets and products,” he said.

Beason and his team built the practice from the ground up. He was a newly married young man when he started Renodis. His pregnant wife had recently taken voluntary severance. Cash was scarce. Growth came slowly but surely.

“Every year, every extra dollar went right back into building out products, tools and hiring people to be able to slowly morph into that outsourced model,” he said.

Beason said Renodis spent 2009 to 2013 building its in-house technology to enable itself to fully manage telecom. At the end of that stretch, a CIO approached them about the offering. The CIO wanted to help Renodis make the platform “enterprise-ready.” Moreover, they wanted to become…

As we face into the winds of Q4, M&A activity appears to still be hot, despite whispers of a slowdown. 

Private equity firms and other investors are seeing the value of the channel like never before. Indeed, 2021 was the most active year for M&A in the history of such transactions. 2022 was no exception. 

However, it will be interesting to see what happens as organizations analyze their businesses headed into 2023. Will mergers and acquisitions continue to flourish? Or will providers pump the brakes?

Deals over the last few months have spanned the gamut, from names like Valeo and Magna5 to players such as GoodSuite and GoTo.

Scroll through the images above to see a sampling of the latest mergers and acquisitions and investment deals in the IT/MSP channel in 2022.

Minnesota channel partner Renodis is using M&A to ramp up its competencies in 5G, hospitality and utilities, among other growth areas.

The St. Paul-based telecom and mobility management provider wrapped its fifth acquisition last week in the form of Eric Ryan Corporation. The 20-year-old company’s inorganic growth strategy first started in 2018 but has ramped up in 2022. The agency is planning to announce two more deals by the end of the year.

Renodis’ Craig Beason

“We don’t want to grow faster than we can handle,” Renodis CEO Craig Beason told Channel Futures. “We’ve got our eyes set on getting over $100 million dollars in top line revenue with a healthy EBITA to the bottom, and I think we have a good plan,”

Background

Beason founded the agency in 2002.  At the time he held no telecom experience, other than working in a carrier’s HR division. Nevertheless, Beason said he saw an opportunity to build a telecom service model. As he saw it, business customers would benefit from someone managing their POTS lines from install to end-of-life.

Twenty years ago telecom centered around frame relay, before MPLS came into the picture.

“Telecom’s not a sexy space for enterprise clients. It’s kind of a means to the ends – the janitorial component. I felt at the time that there was a message around building and managing the lifestyle stack of the services,” Beason said. “I felt like enterprises didn’t do a great job with it. Carriers didn’t do a good job supporting it. I thought that the enterprise market would pay to have an expert come in to manage the life cycle, as well as the advisory services that go with that.”

Life Cycle Management

More and more agents brand themselves as holistic providers of technology services. That means expanding beyond vendor sourcing to walking the client through the entire life of the technology. Beason said Renodis was one of the first firms to take this approach.

“I’ve always said that this is where it’s going to go. The customers and the carriers are going to require agents to do more than brokering the services. There’s a lot of value in brokering the services. But unfortunately, as the market and the climate get that much more competitive, you’ve got to be able to offer more value-added services around it,” he said.

However, building such a practice doesn’t occur overnight, Beason said.

“I can build a website overnight and say I do it, but it’s a lot more involved than just working off a spreadsheet. If you’re doing a small client and bill $50,000 a month, maybe you could pull it off. But when you get to the enterprise, they’re looking for just a different level of tool sets and products,” he said.

Beason and his team built the practice from the ground up. He was a newly married young man when he started Renodis. His pregnant wife had recently taken voluntary severance. Cash was scarce. Growth came slowly but surely.

“Every year, every extra dollar went right back into building out products, tools and hiring people to be able to slowly morph into that outsourced model,” he said.

Beason said Renodis spent 2009 to 2013 building its in-house technology to enable itself to fully manage telecom. At the end of that stretch, a CIO approached them about the offering. The CIO wanted to help Renodis make the platform “enterprise-ready.” Moreover, they wanted to become…

As we face into the winds of Q4, M&A activity appears to still be hot, despite whispers of a slowdown. 

Private equity firms and other investors are seeing the value of the channel like never before. Indeed, 2021 was the most active year for M&A in the history of such transactions. 2022 was no exception. 

However, it will be interesting to see what happens as organizations analyze their businesses headed into 2023. Will mergers and acquisitions continue to flourish? Or will providers pump the brakes?

Deals over the last few months have spanned the gamut, from names like Valeo and Magna5 to players such as GoodSuite and GoTo.

Scroll through the images above to see a sampling of the latest mergers and acquisitions and investment deals in the IT/MSP channel in 2022.

AWS is looking to expand its Amazon WorkSpaces desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) portfolio with a new managed infrastructure-only cloud VDI offering. The company previewed Amazon WorkSpaces Core on Thursday during its AWS End-User Computing Innovation Day.

Amazon WorkSpaces Core consists of APIs designed to bridge on-premises VDI infrastructure to the AWS cloud as a managed service. The WorkSpaces Core APIs enable integration with the AWS cloud to scale existing software. Notably, VDI software providers can integrate their offerings with Workspaces Core to extend their desktop images to the AWS cloud.

According to AWS, organizations can scale their existing VDI infrastructure to supported AWS regions to reduce latency and boost performance. Customers can opt for various hardware configurations, from basic CPU instances to GPU-based workstation environments.

AWS’ Muneer Mirza

Muneer Mirza, general manager of AWS’ end-user computing business, described Amazon WorkSpaces Core during Thursday’s virtual event. Mirza explained that organizations could extend their existing VDI management consoles to expand their workspaces with Amazon WorkSpaces. “You get that benefit of continuity of what you’ve been doing on-prem with the cloud-based economics and security and productivity that comes with it,” Mirza said.

Integration with VMware Horizon

Longtime partner VMware is among those that plan to use the Amazon WorkSpaces Core APIs. VMware said it would use the Amazon WorkSpaces Core APIs to provide more extensive integration with VMware Horizon. At the recent VMware Explore conference in San Francisco, VMware demonstrated how to deploy desktop applications. Using the Amazon Workspace Core APIs, VMware claims it will be able to integrate Horizon and Amazon WorkSpaces more extensively.

VMware’s Shawn Bass

Shawn Bass, vice president and CTO of VMware’s end-user computing business, said that despite the two companies’ collaboration, they did little on the virtual desktop side. “But as we look towards this continued hybrid workforce of the future, we see that customers have to do more with less,” Bass said during Thursday’s event. “We need to do is meet customers where they are; we need to offer them choice and flexibility.”

Integrating the APIs will let VMware extend the Horizon experience and its Blast display protocol to Amazon WorkSpaces. “The best part is that customers can manage their virtual desktops and apps on-premises and or in the cloud in an easily easy and seamless manner,” Bass said.

Zoom Partnership

AWS also announced a partnership with Zoom to improve to provide enhanced Zoom meeting performance. The two companies are working together to address the difficulty in rerouting videoconferencing traffic to endpoints more directly.

A new Amazon WorkSpaces Extension SDK bypasses virtual desktops to reduce latency and provide higher quality sessions. The package includes a VDI client, host installer and Zoom Media Plugin. AWS claims it securely offloads video encoding/decoding, bypassing the VDI infrastructure, and communicates directly to Zoom.

According to AWS, the Zoom desktop renders the same functionality but less latency. “We’re going to provide that very, very high-fidelity audio video experience seamlessly as part of our workspace,” Mirza said. AWS said partners looking to evaluate the beta must reach out to their AWS or Zoom account teams.

Ubuntu Desktop on Amazon WorkSpaces

AWS also announced the release of the first Ubuntu Desktop for Amazon Workspaces. Ubuntu is a popular desktop option for developers, data scientists and engineers. Until now, AWS only offered virtual Windows or Amazon Linux desktops with Amazon WorkSpaces.

Minnesota channel partner Renodis is using M&A to ramp up its competencies in 5G, hospitality and utilities, among other growth areas.

The St. Paul-based telecom and mobility management provider wrapped its fifth acquisition last week in the form of Eric Ryan Corporation. The 20-year-old company’s inorganic growth strategy first started in 2018 but has ramped up in 2022. The agency is planning to announce two more deals by the end of the year.

Renodis’ Craig Beason

“We don’t want to grow faster than we can handle,” Renodis CEO Craig Beason told Channel Futures. “We’ve got our eyes set on getting over $100 million dollars in top line revenue with a healthy EBITA to the bottom, and I think we have a good plan,”

Background

Beason founded the agency in 2002.  At the time he held no telecom experience, other than working in a carrier’s HR division. Nevertheless, Beason said he saw an opportunity to build a telecom service model. As he saw it, business customers would benefit from someone managing their POTS lines from install to end-of-life.

Twenty years ago telecom centered around frame relay, before MPLS came into the picture.

“Telecom’s not a sexy space for enterprise clients. It’s kind of a means to the ends – the janitorial component. I felt at the time that there was a message around building and managing the lifestyle stack of the services,” Beason said. “I felt like enterprises didn’t do a great job with it. Carriers didn’t do a good job supporting it. I thought that the enterprise market would pay to have an expert come in to manage the life cycle, as well as the advisory services that go with that.”

Life Cycle Management

More and more agents brand themselves as holistic providers of technology services. That means expanding beyond vendor sourcing to walking the client through the entire life of the technology. Beason said Renodis was one of the first firms to take this approach.

“I’ve always said that this is where it’s going to go. The customers and the carriers are going to require agents to do more than brokering the services. There’s a lot of value in brokering the services. But unfortunately, as the market and the climate get that much more competitive, you’ve got to be able to offer more value-added services around it,” he said.

However, building such a practice doesn’t occur overnight, Beason said.

“I can build a website overnight and say I do it, but it’s a lot more involved than just working off a spreadsheet. If you’re doing a small client and bill $50,000 a month, maybe you could pull it off. But when you get to the enterprise, they’re looking for just a different level of tool sets and products,” he said.

Beason and his team built the practice from the ground up. He was a newly married young man when he started Renodis. His pregnant wife had recently taken voluntary severance. Cash was scarce. Growth came slowly but surely.

“Every year, every extra dollar went right back into building out products, tools and hiring people to be able to slowly morph into that outsourced model,” he said.

Beason said Renodis spent 2009 to 2013 building its in-house technology to enable itself to fully manage telecom. At the end of that stretch, a CIO approached them about the offering. The CIO wanted to help Renodis make the platform “enterprise-ready.” Moreover, they wanted to become…