Fulcrum IT Partners Acquires Stoneworks, Eyes AI Services In The Future

‘We’ve been focused on bringing in those companies who can add to our overall portfolio strengths around services, everything-as-a-service and allows us to leverage each of these companies to make each other stronger,’ says Kelly Carter, chief strategy officer at Fulcrum.

Fulcrum IT Partners this week announced the acquisition of Ottawa, Canada-based Stoneworks Technologies to offer expand its services coast to coast in Canada, with its eyes set on AI in the future.

The acquisition of Stoneworks expands Toronto-based Fulcrum’s vertical specialization in the public sector, which includes departments and agencies within the Canadian federal government.

“Every acquisition we go after has something in common, which is incredible culture, and it all comes down to the person leading the company,” Kyle Lanzinger, president of U.S. and Canada at Fulcrum, told CRN. “The capability that they bring to Canada is quite exciting for us. It’s very complementary to our existing business and it’s incredibly complementary [as it] adds Canada’s largest customer which is the Canadian federal government.”

The acquistion also gives Fulcrum a strong position in the traditional infrastructure and data center market, which it didn’t have until acquiring Stoneworks.

[Related: Fulcrum IT Partners Plans Up To Six More Acquisitions This Year]

Fulcrum said Stoneworks, whose partners include Cisco, Dell, Hitachi, HPE, and VMware, has grown to over $100 million in annual revenue over the last 20 years. Twenty-five employees are coming over with the acquisition, the company added. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Jody Burton, CEO of Stoneworks, said the firm felt that it was time to supercharge everything it had done over two decades and take things to the next level.

“Without us completely reinventing the company and taking on some different verticals we weren’t necessarily as strong in historically, we felt that the conversation around a potential acquisition or partnership would be a good thing to do,” he told CRN.

He said being able to fulfill client demands “in the ever-changing landscape of our industry,” and going deeper with the company’s partnerships “is definitely something that works extremely well for us. The biggest thing would be offering additional services to our clientele. It just makes us a little more robust than we are today.”

This is the third Fulcrum acquisition this year. The company has previously said it plans to do about six with focuses on the U.S., Canada and the U.K. but will look elsewhere if the right fit comes along.

“We’ve been focused on bringing in those companies who can add to our overall portfolio strengths around services and everything-as-a-service which allows us to leverage each of these companies to make each other stronger,” Kelly Carter, chief strategy officer at Fulcrum, told CRN.

Going forward, she said Fulcrum will focus on strengthening its partnerships and looking at vendors, distributors and finance partners that can help with the acceleration of its strategy. A part of that is looking at AI and AI-as-a-service.

“AI is such a quickly evolving and complex new technology,” Lanzinger said. “We really need all the help we can get around that stack of solutions to be able to deliver the best outcome to our customers.”