General Informatics Acquires Eministration In Platform MSP Play

‘The two strategic focuses for us are geographic expansion and technical talent. We always are looking for great talent. They have a great team over there. And we’re excited about utilizing their folks within our larger infrastructure. Of course, they’re excited about us as well because they went from being a small group of 10 engineers to now having over 70 engineers that can help with the various projects that they have going on,’ says General Informatics President and CEO Don Monistere.

IT MSP and solution provider General Informatics has made its seventh MSP acquisition with the purchase of Eministration, an Opelika, Ala.-based IT management and consulting firm, as a way to widen its growing southeastern U.S. footprint.

With the acquisition, which has already closed and for which no value was disclosed, General Informatics achieves two of its strategic focuses in acquisitions, said Don Monistere, president and CEO of the Baton Rouge, La.-based MSP.

“The two strategic focuses for us are geographic expansion and technical talent,” Monistere told CRN. “We always are looking for great talent. They have a great team over there. And we’re excited about utilizing their folks within our larger infrastructure. Of course, they’re excited about us as well because they went from being a small group of 10 engineers to now having over 70 engineers that can help with the various projects that they have going on.”

[Related: Thinking Of Buying Or Selling An MSP? Here Are 6 Tips From Experts ]

Eministration was founded in 1996, and is a full IT MSP located just outside of Auburn, Ala., which is where Auburn University is located, Monistere said.

“It serves a lot of health care in that area, as well as legal and higher education customers, and also government and a little bit of retail as well,” he said. “So the customer base is really diverse, which we really like. Our whole model is looking at tier-two or tier-three type cities. We like to be in those tier-two, tier-three cities because all of the businesses in those local areas need the type of services that we provide. And it’s a lot easier to get some exposure from a marketing perspective in some of those smaller cities.”

The acquisition of Eministration also helps General Informatics expand on another of its strategies, which is to continue expanding in the southeastern U.S., Monistere said.

“It’s another step closer to getting to the Georgia territory,” he said. “We’ve been targeting Macon and Columbus in Georgia. Eministration is really close to those areas and excited about that next step of opening other locations in Georgia.”

General Informatics next target also includes the Florida panhandle, Monistere said.

“We probably would not go into South Florida,” he said. “We would be opportunistic about wanting to cover the panhandle first. Because if you look at where we are, we have a lot of customers in the Mobile [Alabama] and Pensacola [Florida] area. And because of the maritime practice that we have, we recognize that’s an area that we would like to have engineering talent and sales talent.”

Eministration CEO and Founder Scott Lowery is remaining with General Informatics and still deciding on his role going forward, Monistere said.

General Informatics is a platform MSP, which is an MSP that is acquired by a private equity company with the express goal of acquiring other MSPs in order to build a larger organization.

The company was acquired in November 2020 by Rosewood Private Investments, a Dallas-based private equity firm which has since continued to support the MSP in its acquisitions, Monistere said.

Eministration is General Informatics’ seventh acquisition.

General Informatics in December 2022 unveiled the acquisitions of 1 Ping Security, a Raleigh, N.C.-based MSSP, and Vazata, a McKinney, Texas-based company that also has a data center services business.

Prior to that, General Informatics in January, 2022 acquired CMS IP Technology and Unicom. General Informatics in November, 2021 acquired Versiant, and In May, 2021 acquired Emco Technologies.

The MSP currently has about 200 employees and annual revenue of about $60 million. Despite its inorganic growth with all its acquisitions, the company still sees organic growth of about 12 percent per year.

Looking ahead, General Informatics is in the process of building a managed security service provider, or MSSP, Monistere said.

“In my definition of MSSP, you have to have your own SoC (security operations center),” he said. “And we’re in the process of doing that. We feel like we’ll have that done eventually.”

General Informatics already has a big security practice which includes virtual CEO services, Monistere said.

The new MSSP will likely be a wholly-owned subsidiary, he said.

“We’ll likely do an acquisition that will allow us to have that SoC,” he said. “We’re actually looking at one acquisition right now that I can’t talk about because we’re of course under an NDA. And we’re hoping that that will happen before the end of this year. And that will catapult us into that MSSP space.”

When that happens, General Informatics and the MSSP will work closely together, Monistere said.

“We would provide what you would consider to be typical managed security services,” he said. “But the advanced security services would come from our MSSP.”