CBTS CEO On Recovery Point Buy: Resilience Is Now A ‘Boardroom Conversation’

‘This is a huge opportunity for us to have a DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service) conversation with clients, and they can actually use one trusted partner for everything they need from here on out versus having to go to another partner for recovery services,’ says CBTS CEO Kristin Russell.

CBTS’ acquisition last week of Recovery Point Systems gives the Cincinnati-based solution provider a new disaster recovery-as-a-service, ransomware recovery and cyber resilience capability that CBTS CEO Kristin Russell told CRN fills a major gap in the company’s end-to-end infrastructure services portfolio.

Russell, who joined CBTS in May, described CBTS as a 30-year-old full-scale solutions provider serving more than 3,000 clients, from midmarket enterprises to Fortune 100 companies, with services that span design, build, management, professional services, managed services, security, staffing and product resale.

Recovery Point adds the recovery piece CBTS, ranked No. 49 in CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500, previously had to address through partners, Russell said, while giving Recovery Point access to CBTS’ broader scale, client base and capabilities.

“Today we do some backup services, but in a lot of cases we have to partner with other companies to provide what Recovery Point provides today,” she said. “So this is a huge opportunity for us to have a DRaaS conversation with clients, and they can actually use one trusted partner for everything they need from here on out versus having to go to another partner for recovery services.”

Russell said Recovery Point stood out because of its technical specialization, loyal customers, similar culture, and ability to support everything from mainframe to cloud environments.

“Their secret sauce is really in the operational processes and in the infrastructure of the data center, and how they do what they do,” she said. “That’s really what attracted [CBTS] to them.”

The deal also reflects what Russell sees as rising demand for resilience as AI workloads, cybersecurity risks and outages become board-level issues.

“This is no longer an afterthought IT project that you can do after your enterprise has been built,” she said. “It’s really something that clients are increasingly wanting to build into the same operating model and system.”

There’s a lot going on at CBTS and the disaster recovery and resilience fields. To learn more, read CRN’s full conversation with Russell, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

How do you define CBTS?

CBTS is a full-scale solutions company. We’ve been around for 30 years, serving over 3,000 clients from mid-market enterprise to Fortune 100 clients. We provide a wide range of solutions to customers, everything from designing and managing to building their infrastructures and their technology foundations for the future.

You joined CBTS in May of 2025. What brought you to the company?

First of all, I loved how CBTS cares for its clients. There’s just such a caring relationship with their clients. We have very low churn in the organization, and we have the privilege of serving very, very big clients, but also a lot of clients that are smaller in size that really benefit from our capabilities and expertise. So I think it was our clients and the relationship we had with our clients that really attracted me to CBTS. But the other thing I’d have to say is the culture and the people of CBTS are like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It’s a Midwest values company, and so we have tons of integrity and just care about each other. And there’s so much expertise in the company as well. It’s really all of those things that really brought me to CBTS.

Does CBTS have a private equity backer?

Yes, yes. [New York and London-based] TowerBrook Capital Partners purchased the company. It was from a carve-out from Cincinnati Bell named Altafiber in December of 2024. I came in May of 2025 to work for the company after the carve-out had been completed. TowerBrook has been an incredible partner to work with, investing in the growth of CBTS, and this new acquisition is just one example of how they’ve done that.

So CBTS acquired Recovery Point Systems. How do you describe that company?

Recovery Point is a fully managed disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) provider that also does ransomware recovery and cyber resilience. It offers recovery planning and system testing and implementation. And it also has two or three fiber-dense data centers available for colocation and hosting for customers as well. So they are really specialists in the DRaaS environment. That’s really what they do, and they do that very well. …

Recovery Point’s technology is agnostic. It depends on what the customer’s technology is. They support everything from mainframe to cloud environments. Their secret sauce is really in the operational processes and in the infrastructure of the data center, and how they do what they do, which is really what attracted us to them.

How did you learn about Recovery Point?

We’ve been looking at quite a few targets for acquisition, and we were really looking for a company that would complement what CBTS has as its core. CBTS, to reiterate, is a company that provides design, build, and management of enterprise infrastructure, and that includes everything from security services to managed services to project services to professional services, staff augmentation, and product resale. We do a lot of things for customers today, but the one thing that we were missing was the end of the life cycle capability around recovery. And as we looked at Recovery Point, we found this incredible connection between what they offer, and they do it exceptionally well and how we could lift and leverage that for CBTS’ clients. Today, we can take a customer all the way from advising them and helping them design, build, buy products, and manage those products, but when it comes to recovery, we didn’t have their level of capability. Recovery Point is really a bolt-on so we can provide a complete end-to-end lifecycle support management and services to our customers, and that was really what attracted us. Also, they have incredible client loyalty, just like CBTS does, and technical specialists that are the best in the business at their craft. And again, their culture is very similar to CBTS’ culture and how we think about who we are internally and how we support customers.

Was Recovery Point looking to be acquired, or was this an initiative from CBTS?

I can’t really comment on how active they were. We found each other through the process. They were owned by private equity firm Abry Partners. In the process of looking at different acquisition targets and talking to people, we got connected to them and realized that it was a really good connection because they were looking to scale their business because they were just DRaaS. CBTS has AI, data security, cloud, all of these things across 3,000 clients, but we didn’t have that slice. They had that slice, but didn’t have the scale.

So for CBTS, DRaaS is a completely new business?

Today we do some backup services, but in a lot of cases we have to partner with other companies to provide what Recovery Point provides today. So this is a huge opportunity for us to have a DRaaS conversation with clients, and they can actually use one trusted partner for everything they need from here on out versus having to go to another partner for recovery services. We think that’s important because resilience and recovery is becoming more and more of a boardroom conversation. This is no longer an afterthought IT project that you can do after your enterprise has been built. It’s really something that clients are increasingly wanting to build into the same operating model and system, and that’s because of all the things that we’re seeing in the world today with growing AI workloads, cybersecurity threats, and outages. This is becoming a more important thing for clients to figure out how to resolve, and now we have that capability to bring that to the table with our clients. Recovery Point also now has the ability to bring the things we do that they didn’t do: product resale, managed services, security operations, network operations, data center management. None of those things they really did. We can bring that to their clients.

How much did CBTS pay for Recovery Point?

The financial terms are not being disclosed.

Was Recovery Point a profitable company?

Again, I don’t know if I can comment on that publicly. But Recovery Point has a very successful track record with clients. They were recognized in Gartner’s Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) Magic Quadrant for six consecutive years in this space. So they’ve been highly successful at what they’ve done for clients.

Was the acquisition closed?

Yes.

What are the integration plans, and what happens to the Recovery Point people?

My goal right now is just to bring the companies together. As I said, there’s not a lot of overlap between our capabilities and their capabilities, and we really value the specialists and the clients that they bring to CBTS. So we want to make sure to focus on that and preserve that through all the integration planning that happens.

Will Recovery Point’s management team and former owners join CBTS?

I’m not at liberty to discuss the specifics on leaders that are staying with the company or not. But again, our focus is protecting our clients on both sides, making sure that there is a business as usual, do no harm motion. With this acquisition, because there’s so much good to preserve with Recovery Point, we just do not want to interrupt that. There’s a lot of things that can go bad to erode value during acquisitions, and it is my priority that that does not happen.

What happens to the Recovery Point brand? Does that go away and everything is now CBTS going forward?

More to come. We’re still in the planning phases of that, and we’ll let you know when and if that changes for us. But again, right now we’re just really focused on bringing the capabilities over, bringing the specialists that can immediately be deployed to CBTS clients. Recovery Point has an incredible brand in the market, and we want to make sure clients know that the same brand and that same company can be depended on and relied on for the excellent service that they provide going forward through the acquisition.

Is Recovery Point the first acquisition for CBTS?

This is not our first acquisition. We made another acquisition when we were a part of Altafiber, but it’s been a long time. We acquired Onyx, which is a solutions provider company up in Canada. … CBTS made the acquisition of Onyx, and then those two sections got carved out by TowerBrook and then became a standalone company.

Where does CBTS have operations globally?

We have an offshore team in several cities in India that we leverage for clients. We support clients globally across multiple countries, but most of our clients that we do business with globally are actually U.S. or Canadian customers. We have operations globally.

Is there anything else you think we need to know about CBTS?

I think with a lot of acquisitions, it’s a tuck-in strategy more focused on synergies and things like that. This acquisition brings real capabilities [on] day one to CBTS clients. There’s increasing demand for those capabilities based on what’s happening in the world of technology, and that’s important to us. That’s important to us to be able to say we can offer a full solution to customers.