Canadian MSP Beefs Up Geographic, Deployment Muscle With Acquisition

Two Canadian solution providers have come together to create a powerhouse with expertise in everything from cloud to managed services to product rollouts.

Montreal-based Groupe Access' acquisition of Toronto-based Tenet Computer Group creates a 110-employee titan with annual sales of more than $30 million and 110 employees across Ontario and Quebec.

"We're one big powerhouse now," said Rick Jordan, Tenet's director of sales and strategic alliances. "This is a great marriage."

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Tenet, which employs 15 and does $5 million in sales each year, will retain its own branding for now and operate as a standalone company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

As a result of the deal, Jordan said, Tenet's existing customers will have access to more expertise around vendors such as Veeam Software and Microsoft. Groupe Access is a Microsoft Gold cloud solution provider and owns its own data center and network operations center (NOC), Jordan said.

The combined company plans to go after new corporate clients in both large enterprise and small business, Jordan said. Jordan said Tenet has a strong health-care practice, serving many hospitals in the Toronto area.

"We plan on growing the company very aggressively," Jordan said. "We're willing, we're able and we're ready to do great business."

Tenet is a traditional VAR more focused on traditional rollouts and technical resources around Tier 1 vendors such as HPE, Lenovo and Cisco, Jordan said.

Tenet and Groupe Access met through Ingram Micro's Trust X Alliance when Groupe Access was looking for a solution provider with ConnectWise experience. That led to broader conversations between Group Access President Doug Elie -- who was looking to expand his company into Ontario -- and Tenet CEO Carlos Paz-Soldan, who was looking for an exit strategy.

"After a year, the deal finally transpired," Jordan said. "There's no [geographic] overlap, so no one lost their jobs."

Tenet retained all of its accounting, sales and business development staff as the companies operate in different provinces. The vast majority of Tenet’s clients are within 100 miles of Toronto, Jordan said.

Kitty Atkinson, formerly Tenet's vice president of sales and marketing, is spearheading Tenet's operations as its executive director. Paz-Soldan spun off Tenet's ISV software mobile application business into a separate company called Techmien, which he now runs.