Anexinet Acquires Veristor, Adding Security, Storage Capabilities

‘From an infrastructure perspective, and cloud, we’re locked and loaded. ... We have significantly increased our cross-sell opportunity and, most importantly, we’ve significantly increased our value to customers,’ says Anexinet CEO Brian Glahn.

Anexinet, a member CRN’s MSP 500 Elite 150, has bought fellow listmaker Veristor Systems to add capabilities around security, storage, networking and DevOps.

The acquisition about doubles Blue Bell, Pa.-based Anexinet’s employee count to approximately 350 and grows the companies’ geographic reach and capabilities, the CEOs told CRN in a joint interview. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“I would consider us—from a services standpoint—one of the strongest on the East Coast now combined,” said Brian Glahn, who became CEO of Anexinet last year. “They’re the powerhouse in the Southeast. They have capabilities that the Anexinet platform would have to build. And by bringing these two companies together, we’re able to leverage each other’s strengths and bring them into our client base.”

[RELATED: Anexinet To Acquire Cisco Partner Light Networks For ‘Full Stack’ Data Center Offering]

“Our solution sets are just going to expand and even get deeper and better, and the benefactor of that is—first and foremost—the end user for us. It’s our customer,” Ashby Lincoln, co-founder and CEO of Duluth, Ga.-based Veristor, told CRN.

The companies are still working out any changes in branding. But Lincoln and the Veristor leadership team plan to stay on. The companies have few overlapping customers, the CEOs said.

Anexinet’s vendor partners include Amazon Web Services, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Salesforce, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell Technologies, according to the company.

Veristor’s vendor partners include HPE, VMware, Intel, Red Hat, NetApp, Cisco and Palo Alto Networks, according to the company.

“From an infrastructure perspective, and cloud, we’re locked and loaded,” Glahn said. “We have the full stack. We have experts in Cisco now. We’ve got scale. We have significantly increased our cross-sell opportunity and, most importantly, we’ve significantly increased our value to customers.”

Anexinet, which is part of private equity firm Mill Point Capital’s portfolio, bought communications-focused service provider Light Networks last year and data center automation service provider SereneIT in 2020.

Mill Point is also invested in IT services companies Pythian and Avenu, according to the firm’s website.

Previous Mill Point portfolio company DLT Solutions was sold to Tech Data in 2019 for $205 million. Kemp, another previous Mill Point portfolio company, was sold to Progress in November for $258 million. And CXtec bought previous Mill Point portfolio company Atlantix Global Systems in 2017.

Glahn said he’s still interested in acquisitions, but his focus is on integrating Veristor and maximizing the cross-selling potential for both companies.

“We have plenty of organic opportunity over the next 12 to 24 months getting those solutions and practice areas across our client bases,” he said.

Founded in 2001—one year after Anexinet—Veristor was one of the first companies to provide backup and disaster recovery services for VMware, Lincoln said. The company has customers in most major industries, including law firms, universities and health-care companies.

Lincoln said he is already thinking about the new capabilities in infrastructure orchestration and networking telephony that Veristor can offer customers after joining Anexinet.

“Those are things that we don’t do today from a Veristor side that we know we’re going to be able to plug right into our current customers and just continue to expand, tie those solutions together,” he said.