Startup MSP DataStrike Enters Market, Acquires MiCore

‘We've got some of the brightest minds from Oracle, some of the brightest Microsoft SQL Server experts in the world, some of whom actually grew up in our prior company at RDX. It's everything required in a fractionalized delivery model. We've got a stable of technicians and resources here on shore, primarily clustered around our headquarters outside of Pittsburgh,’ says DataStrike CEO Buddy Flerl.

DataStrike, a startup managed service provider that has just entered the market, Wednesday said it has acquired another MSP, MiCore, in a move to build what it calls the largest MSP specializing in data infrastructure services for SMBs.

With the acquisition, DataStrike gets a profitable database and cloud management services provider, as well as the sales team it needs to grow its business, CEO Buddy Flerl told CRN.

While DataStrike, which was founded in late 2022, is new to the market, Flerl (pictured) and his management team are MSP veterans.

Flerl founded a number of IT services companies, including a data infrastructure-focused MSP called RDX. RDX acquired several other MSPs including in 2019 Navisite, and then rebranded itself with the Navisite name. Flerl left in 2020, and global solution provider Accenture early this year acquired Navisite.

Prior to acquiring RDX, Flerl acquired a remote Oracle training company and a DBA (database administrator)-as-a-service shop. With that experience, and his experience as an investor, Flerl said he turned RDX into a good pure-play service provider for data infrastructure.

“The way life goes, when you get really, really big financial partners get dreams of wanting the company to suddenly do everything for everyone,” he said. “Ultimately, when we sold Navisite to Accenture, it was very much a very large portfolio of services. And I realized that the space that we occupied as RDX was kind of vacated to some degree as Navisite got bigger and broader and moved a lot more services offshore. And I was like, where are all these customers going? Once Navisite was acquired, I kept asking that question, and nobody really knew.”

That led Flerl to a decision to try to replicate RDX’s success. He got much of the RDX management team back together and set up DataStrike in late 2022.

“It's the same executive team, the same backing, same approach, same religion, same model,” he said. “We're even back in our old RDX campus, with all the exercise facilities and cafeterias. All of our facilities. But we're taking a 2024 approach to it.”

That 2024 approach is a hybrid model that accounts for businesses working with public and private clouds and on-premises, Flerl said.

“And you throw on top of that a lot of homegrown stuff that they kind of want to move from, and kind of don't,” he said. “And this creates a lot of side eyes and head-scratcher. [Oracle Founder] Larry Ellison said back in 2016 that DBAs are going to die. We've got the same engineers and some of the same great technicians, some of whom think of themselves as DBAs. Today, we like to think of them as more data infrastructure engineers. But surprise, surprise: Oracle didn't go away. SQL Server didn't go away. We've got Redshift and Aurora and all the rest of them, but they’re all still alive and kicking. And so we’re, we’re as busy as ever with the customers and clients that have come on board.”

Flerl is the only investor in DataStrike,

“I was a venture capitalist up until about 20 years ago,” he said. “And 20 years ago, I started investing off my own personal balance sheet. I was the original backer of RDX. And now I'm backing DataStrike. There’s no institutional capital, no outside private equity. You're talking to the to the private equity banker right now.”

Flerl and his team built DataStrike from the ground up.

“We gathered up some of our old team, and started building out the infrastructure,” he said. “We had just some basic housekeeping we had to get out of the way because this was basically a restart. So no SOC (security operations center), no enterprise monitoring tool, nothing at the start. We made some pretty significant investments to get some of that basic infrastructure for an MSP out of the way.”

The final investment was the acquisition of MiCore, a boutique Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, service providers based in the Washington, D.C. area.

“OCI has become an extremely busy area,” Flerl said. “Over the last 12 months, there's a lot of activity happening there. Oracle's getting very aggressive with the market. The acquisition of OCI became our commercial launch off point.”

DataStrike is focused on managed services around all the major cloud providers except for Google Cloud Platform, Flerl said. On the platform side, it provides services around Oracle, Microsoft, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, and Databricks, as well as open source platforms, he said.

“That’s not to say that we are a cloud-only service provider,” he said. “Plenty of our clients are hybrid. We’ve got some clients that are fully in the cloud, some we took to the cloud and now manage it for them, and others who are still 80 percent on-prem.”

DataStrike’s managed services include database monitoring with enterprise-grade tools such as Santa Barbara, Calif.-based LogicMonitor, Flerl said.

“We’ve got some of the brightest minds from Oracle, some of the brightest Microsoft SQL Server experts in the world, some of whom actually grew up in our prior company at RDX,” he said. “It's everything required in a fractionalized delivery model. We've got a stable of technicians and resources here on shore, primarily clustered around our headquarters outside of Pittsburgh, just like RDX was. We have other folks scattered around. We have an offshore post, but we don't necessarily focus on that. We're very much focused on a 100-percent onshore offering, but the offshore team is there for certain situations.”

Prior to the acquisition of MiCore, DataStrike had 15 to 20 personnel, but with MiCore it now has 50 to 60 people, Flerl said. He expects that to grow to close to 100 people by the fourth quarter of this year.

DataStrike could do more acquisitions, but that is not a company mandate, Flerl said.

“There has not been and will not be an asset that hits the market that we don't take a hard look at,” he said. “We look at them every week. But we've got a fairly rigid set of criteria that needs to be met for us. And historically, it’s been very difficult for us to find an acquisition that fits our mold. Now, you may look at my acquisition history with Navisite and say, ‘But he did 15 acquisitions.’ That was Navisite. That was a different mandate, with a different investment partner who wanted us to build a mini-Accenture, and we did just that.”