With the company looking to expand further West, Vertical Solutions Inc. has acquired IT technology consulting company Warp 8.
Vertical, the Pittsburgh, PA-based managed IT service and cloud partner, has been operating since 1986. The company has executed a handful of acquisitions over the last four or five years. This latest deal will help the company reach further into Warp 8’s Arvada, CO-based territory, according to Bruce Nelson, president, Vertical Solutions.
“We’ve been looking to expand our operations into the Denver Metro market and the western region,” Nelson tells ChannelE2E.
The Attraction
Nelson says he was attracted to Warp 8’s focus on cloud solutions and managed services. “We see a lot of the smaller IT partners that are still in that ‘sell some equipment, break-fix’ model don’t quite understand managed services in the cloud,” he says. “Warp 8 certainly adopted the model of managed services going back a number of years and really embraced the cloud with Microsoft Azure platforms, which is what attracted us as well.”
Additionally, Nelson says Vertical liked Warp 8’s Desktop as a Service platform on Microsoft Azure. “There were things they were doing there that would fit really well and complement things we were doing on our end as well,” he says.
The companies have been aware of each other for around three years, but discussions around the deal didn’t start until late spring 2017, according to Nelson. “We’d done a joint event earlier in the year and it went well,” he explains. “After that, the idea that I’d be interested in acquiring their practice was something they were interested in discussing. The talks went from there.”
Warp 8’s employees will join the Vertical team, bolstering their existing team in Colorado. The company also has offices and Florida and serves clients throughout Mid America and the West.
Healthcare And More
Nelson says customers can look forward to expanded services, including in Microsoft Dynamics GP and Dynamics 365, as well as what he calls Vertical’s back office expertise, and the company’s security offerings, especially as it relates to the healthcare sector.
“We’ve got specific expertise in and around HIPAA compliance, security offerings around healthcare, and we’ve really grown our model over the last five or six years and continue to expand our healthcare space.”
Indeed, Vertical has been doubling down on its interactions with the healthcare arena, where Nelson says the company is very focused on developing deep expertise and building unique solutions. “It’s a space you can’t really dabble in, so we got really focused with some good partners in the healthcare space to deliver those solutions,” he says.
Looking ahead, Nelson says the company is looking for more acquisition opportunities and will continue to develop and grow its solutions suite.
