Champion Solutions Adds EAI Services With Acquisition

Champion, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based solution provider specializing in storage networking, high availability clustering, and server and storage consolidation picks up Commerce Inn's full-service Lotus/Domino, WebSphere, and DB2 practice. Champion did not release terms of the deal.

Champion plans to integrate Commerce Inn into its eBusiness Solutions Division, said Champion president and CEO Chris Pyle. The division will be headed by Alec Cartinian, former president of Commerce Inn, Pyle said.

The decision to acquire the company came about after Champion looked into what customers were doing with all the storage systems that are being installed, said Pyle.

"We've been installing terabytes and terabytes of SANs," he said. "But then we got down and asked what customers were storing. It's databases, e-based records because of Sarbanes-Oxley, automated records. So we decided we had to do part of that business."

Champion does not plan to provide applications like PeopleSoft or SAP, but instead wants to pursue the middleware part of the market, Pyle said. "We focused on managing the storage in the past," he said. "Now we want to help customers architect their storage."

Champion has been subcontracting its middleware business to Commerce Inn for about a year so executives had confidence in the integrator's capabilities. Acquiring Commerce Inn was a much more preferable way to get into this space than starting from scratch, Pyle said.

"When you hire new people, there's a risk," he said. "Also, by making the acquisition, our own people know we are serious about this business as compared to hiring a person here and a person there."