NWN Carousel Acquired By American Securities, Takes Aim At $100B AI Flexible Workspaces Market

'With the size, scale, experience and just great reputation of American Securities we have the opportunity to triple the company once again to $3 billion in the next four years,’ says NWN Carousel President and CEO Jim Sullivan.

NWN Carousel has been acquired by private equity behemoth American Securities in a deal that sets the SP500 powerhouse up to break open the $100 billion market for AI-powered flexible workplace services of the future, said NWN Carousel President and CEO Jim Sullivan.

Sullivan told CRN that under prior owner, New State Capital Partners, NWN Carousel grew from a regional service provider into a national cloud communications powerhouse, acquiring Carousel Industries in 2021, and tripling gross annual revenues over the last four years to over $900 million.

“With the size, scale, experience and just great reputation of American Securities we have the opportunity to triple the company once again to $3 billion in the next four years,” said Sullivan (pictured). “With American Securities we have a tier one private equity company to help us accelerate growth and innovation.”

Terms of the deal with American Securities– which has $27 billion in assets under management- were not disclosed.

Among American Securities’ successes in the channel are its acquisition and sale of Presidio, No. 23 on the CRN 2023 SP500, in 2014, and its current investment in Trace3, No. 36 on the SP500. Exeter, R.I.-based NWN Carousel is No. 51 on the CRN 2023 SP500.

Sullivan said the American Securities backing opens the door to expanded M&A (mergers and acquisitions) with additional geographic coverage and incremental services aimed at accelerating the adoption of NWN Carousel’s highly regarded Experience Management Platform (EMP).

EMP is a proprietary software multicloud unified communications management platform developed by NWN Carousel that has powered recurring revenue sales growth from next to nothing four years ago to 65 percent of sales, said Sullivan.

“EMP is the key reason we are winning in the market and seeing broad adoption in the new modern hybrid workplace,” he said.”Nobody else has this technology. We’re providing a management platform for UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service), contact centers, and customer devices over telecommuncations with a secure network. This a turnkey solution that gives the customers the ability to do self provisioning, pull their own reports and do their own analytics.”

The EMP platform – which works hand in the with the popular ServiceNow IT management platform- has been singled out time and time again by customers as a competitive differentiator and a brand market maker, said NWN Carousel Chief Marketing Officer Andrew Gilman.

“EMP is the killer app that has allowed customers to adapt to a modern, flexible intelligent workplace,” he said. “EMP is providing multicloud and hybrid cloud services integration and full observability for customers to achieve the business outcomes they need to be successful and now we are taking it into the AI era.”

Gilman, who has led the NWN Carousel branding effort, said the American Securities partnership marks a new era of AI-enabled workplace growth for the company. “It’s game on!” he said. “We are now a national powerhouse that has become synonymous with delivering a differentiated flexible workspace employee experience”

The American Securities investment is a tribute to the NWN Carousel management team and the EMP platform it built for modern hybrid work, said Sullivan.

“We have built something very special here,” he said. “We are 100 percent focused on customers and what it means to go from on-prem to the cloud with differentiated capabilities that allows customers to drive business outcomes. In order to do that you need the right team developing and delivering these solutions, a financially strong business model and the right financial partner to continue to scale the business.That is what we are focused on!”

Two key metrics that show the strength of the company, said Sullivan, is NWN Carousel’s “world class” customer net promoter score (NPS)– a measure of customer satisfaction- of 70 and its employee net promoter score by its 1,100 employees of 82, up from 70 over the last year.

NWN Carousel could not be better positioned to tackle the $100 billion market in hybrid, AI enabled flexible workspace services as it has been delivering AI solutions for the last several years and has infused all of its offerings with AI enhancements, said Sullivan.

“Everything we are doing internally on automation and machine learning has AI enhancements,” he said. “The contact center market- which is one of our strongest segments- will be one of the fastest areas of AI adoption with strong business outcomes for customers. There is lots of innovation going into those solutions. We have unique capabilities to implement these AI solutions with strong return on investment for customers.”

Sullivan said he could not be more excited about the opportunity ahead working with American Securities to accelerate the adoption of EMP into enterprise accounts. “We are going to crush it!” he said.