Fast Growth 150: No Speed Bumps Here On The Road To Success

Overall, this year’s Fast Growth 150 recorded an average two-year growth rate of 135 percent. That’s down a bit from the 145 percent average for the 2023 Fast Growth 150 class, but up from the 93 percent growth recorded by the 2022 Fast Growth 150.

These are challenging times for solution providers as they navigate both ongoing economic uncertainty and a rapidly changing technology landscape as artificial intelligence remakes the IT industry.

The annual CRN Fast Growth 150 recognizes solution providers who are not just succeeding today but recording double-digit and triple-digit growth rates. The list ranks solution providers with annual sales of at least $1 million by their average two-year growth rate (this year for 2022 and 2023). The 25 solution providers with the fastest growth rates appear in this slideshow while the complete Fast Growth 150 list can be found here.

Driven Technologies, a New York City-based provider of IT professional and managed security services, tops this year’s Fast Growth 150 list with an amazing 4,690.7 percent two-year growth rate.

Fueling the company’s organic growth is the company’s “secure, modernize and connect” strategy and Armor methodology that takes a security- and applications-first approach to customer engagements – unlike legacy resellers that start at the hardware/network level. Driven’s growth is also due, in part, to the company’s acquisition of New York solution provider Yotta Connect in March 2023.

The 2024 list includes some well-known names in the channel such as Converge Technology Solutions (No. 67), Trace3 (No. 102), Winslow Technology Group (No. 132) and World Wide Technology (No. 146).

This year’s list also has many solution providers appearing for the first time including the top six. No. 2-ranked Uprise Partners, based in Portland, Maine, provides IT, cybersecurity and software engineering services for small and mid-size businesses. No. 6-ranked RapidScale, headquartered in Raleigh, N.C., offers professional and managed IT services and cloud solutions.

Trace3 is making its first appearance on the Fast Growth 150 since 2019 with a two-year growth rate of 63.7 percent. Some of that growth is due to its purchases of Lasalle Solutions in April 2022 and Set Solutions in April 2023. But much of the solution provider’s growth is organic and in September, at the Irvine, Calif.-based company’s Evolve conference, CEO Rich Fennessy vowed to grow Trace3’s revenue from $2.5 billion to $4 billion by 2026.

AI, data and analytics services will be a big part of that growth, Fennessy told CRN in January. “We believe the first set of conversations that we should be having with our clients is about their data. What is your most important data? How are you leveraging data today? How are you turning data into an asset that can help you fuel growth in the company? We believe in data and analytics as a topic. It merges together with security and cloud and is at the heart of this whole AI topic. This is going to be a growing part of our business going forward and it feeds the rest of our business,” he said.

Coretelligent, a Needham, Mass.-based MSP, has made the Fast Growth 150 list in seven of the last 10 years and is here again in 2024 with a 52.8 percent two-year growth rate. Contributing to that was the September 2023 acquisition of fellow service provider Advanced Network Products, a deal that expanded Coretelligent’s mid-Atlantic region presence and brought new expertise and new customers to the company.

“The talent level of their team from an engineering prowess basis is very impressive,” Coretelligent President and CEO Kevin Routhier told CRN in September. “We all know how hard it is to find tech talent. It’s still a very tight job market. And we saw an opportunity to bring in a group that is very well versed in the Microsoft Azure stack and has done more work in terms of depth of integration within the Microsoft technology stack than most MSPs. We felt it was a very nice complement to the engineering structure that we currently have in place for our different practices.”

Omega Systems, a leading MSP and MSSP that delivers cloud, cybersecurity and compliance services, is No. 25 on this year’s list thanks to its 154.8 percent two-year growth rate. The Reading, Pa.-based company has expanded through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions – the latter including IT services companies PICS ITech in August 2022 and The TNS Group in January 2023. (The company has continued that momentum this year with its acquisitions of Amnet Technology Solutions and Cloudpath in June.)

World Wide Technology (No. 7 on the CRN Solution Provider 500) made the 2024 Fast Growth 150 list with 48.9 percent two-year growth – impressive given that maintaining rapid growth can be a challenge as companies become significantly bigger.

Working with IT startups with leading-edge products and seeing new technologies like generative AI as key opportunities to expand customer engagements are key aspects of WWT’s growth, CEO Jim Kavanaugh said in October at the 2023 Xchange Best of Breed Conference.

Kyle Alspach, CJ Fairfield and Joseph F. Kovar contributed to this story.