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.

Dare we say, we have a juicy cloud news roundup in store for you today. Over at VMware, the top five execs stand to make a lot — a lot — of money if they leave once the $61 billion Broadcom acquisition closes. We break down the amounts and the buckets those millions will come from.

Earlier this week, Kevin Jones, CEO of Rackspace Technology for almost four years, lost his job. We caught up with industry analyst Holger Mueller for deeper insight into the turnover (this marks Rackspace’s fifth top leader since 2016). We also get Mueller’s perspective on what new CEO Amar Maletira needs to do to help the struggling managed service provider.

In other hot cloud news, we’ve got a look at Akamai’s strategy for indie cloud provider Linode. Those details have been six months in the making, and channel partners will want to understand what’s in store. That’s because many a partner was feeling skeptical about a content delivery network vendor that targets large organizations taking on a cloud provider that serves small firms and developers.

Finally in this week’s cloud news roundup, we take a peek at Google Cloud’s expansion plans (forgive us our 12-year-old movie reference — it was irresistible). And, on a similar note, Synergy Research Group has new data on European cloud providers.

Check out the week’s biggest cloud news in the slideshow above.

That’s a wrap for Trellix Xpand Live 2022, and a number of partners said they’re impressed with the company’s road map and are looking forward to its new partner program.

The company’s first conference, including a partner summit, took place this week in Las Vegas. Trellix Xpand attracted about 1,500 attendees.

The company stems from the merger of McAfee Enterprise and FireEye last October. STG acquired both companies last year.

Robert Bogan is CGI Federal‘s senior consultant.

“I was very much impressed with the roadmap I saw from the presentation,” he said. “I work with federal agencies and a lot of them have some of the remnants of the legacy pieces of Trellix, being FireEye and McAfee. And so to see their vision in terms of incorporating the two companies together is actually kind interesting. It differentiates them. I really like what FireEye brings to the table in terms of their researchers and their team.”

Trellix will launch its new partner program, Xtend, during the first quarter of 2023. It’s Trellix’ first unified partner program.

“We are going to benefit from the new partner program,” Bogan said. “One of my roles is I sit on an endpoint detection and response (EDR) team and we absolutely are going to benefit. With our partnership, they’ll provide us training. We need that with the team to be able to offer our customers an unbiased capabilities list of what they bring to the table.”

How Trellix Compares to Competitors

Bogan said he’s interested in bringing back to his team what differentiates Trellix from some of the other tools CGI Federal is looking at from its competitors like SentinelOne and CrowdStrike.

“FireEye was first in line in terms of EDR, so they always look good as a tool,” he said. “But because of the recent merger, there was a little confusion in terms of looking at the different components. So my take back from the conference and partnership is they have plans for that, specifically to do the integration and make the single-pane-of-glass experience less painful for our end users, to bridge that gap between those two tools. We’re familiar with both of those tools, but I heard them say they’re aware that McAfee brings a better user interface. So it looks like they’re trying to bridge that gap by bringing the best of both worlds together and it’s very interesting to see how that happens.”

‘Tremendous’ Opportunity Around Data Security

Seclore’s John Murrugarra

John Murrugarra is an enterprise account executive with Seclore. He said his company sees “tremendous opportunity” with Trellix around data security.

“We’re in the business of helping businesses protect their intellectual property,” he said. “And to see where Trellix is going around data security, around data protection, is encouraging. It’s been a challenge that’s been around for many years and nobody’s been able to quite get it right. But what I’m learning that Trellix is just trying to make it easier for everyone, to automate and bring more value. We fit into that ecosystem. I’m looking forward to how we now put it all into action going home.”

Aaron Jones is Emerson‘s manager of cybersecurity and shared services.

“The conference has been great, I like it a lot,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll benefit from the new partner program.”

Trellix has been meeting Emerson’s expectations as a partner, Jones said.

“They’re great to work with, great products, and I’m looking forward to selling more together,” he said.

Shift in Trellix’s Channel Strategy

Trellix’s Britt Norwood

Britt Norwood is Trellix’s senior vice president of global channels and commercial. He said partners have been “really gracious with us” as the company has operated with two separate partner programs.

Xtend represents a shift in Trellix‘ channel strategy, he said.

“We had over 15,000 partners when I took over the channel in November [2021],” Norwood said. “We needed to get to the right 200 to 300 and really invest heavily in those 200 to 300 partners. We’re OK with the long-tail business, but that’s really going to go to our distributors and we want them to really take control of that. So we’re really going to be able to focus our team on those top partners globally. It’s going to be better for them because there will be a better volume of business for each one of them to go after. And it will also be better for them because we’re going to really be able to spend more time with them and really build a practice up. So I would say those are probably the two biggest pivots that we’ve done inside the model.”

In addition, Trellix wants to work closer with distribution, he said.

“So we’ve spent a lot of time getting to know the distribution, the distributors worldwide,” Norwood said. “They’ve been great and we just haven’t really put the right resourcing and investment there, and profitability for them as well. So we really want to make sure that they’re excited to work with us to really help us with those longer tail other partners. But then the ones that are truly building that service play and want to go to market with us, we want that to be the core focus for the company.”

Portfolio to Support Partners in New Channel Program

Aparna Rayasam is Trellix’s chief product officer. She said Trellix’s portfolio is geared toward maximizing partners’ opportunities and success in the new partner program.

“Increasingly when we talk to our customers, they’re looking at partners to help deploy and implement Trellix’s solutions for them,” she said. “So what we want to
do is work for the partners in a way that’s profitable, both for the end customer and the partners. So what are the opportunities that they can do value-add services, for example, and how do we support them? How does the partner support look? Do they work with us? Do they extend our customer success and support teams? So that’s one aspect. The other one is each of these solutions, if partners become the service providers, we don’t want them to be clicking the buttons. We want to make that easy for the partners. But then we want to provide the intelligence to them so that they are the experts that the customers are talking to. So there are multiple avenues. In a few cases, partners may be managing more than one customer, and again in a MSSP model, so we are working with them to give them a federated view of all the customers that they’re managing so they can deploy protection or they can deploy policy across all of them. So it’s a very specific, bespoke partner enablement program. Obviously, we want to work with added customers wherever if there is opportunity. So it’s almost like parallel efforts to make sure that we are satisfying the partner enablement.”

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.