Centre Technologies’ Oklahoma Power Play: Jackson Technical Deal Fuels MSP’s Expansion

‘The technology stack continues to get more and more complicated. AI is going to make it move even faster. And cybersecurity gets more and more advanced, so you have to have scale, and you have to have all the skill sets necessary to manage all that,’ says Centre Technologies CEO and Founder Chris Pace.

MSP and cybersecurity solution provider Centre Technologies expanded its Oklahoma base with the acquisition of Jackson Technical.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition of Tulsa, Okla.-based Jackson Technical gives Centre Technologies, which before the acquisition was ranked No. 278 on CRN’s 2026 Solution Provider 500, a much larger presence in Oklahoma than it had before, as well as a team of professionals that will help it scale its business, said Chris Pace, CEO and founder of the Houston-based company.

“The technology stack continues to get more and more complicated,” Pace told CRN. “AI is going to make it move even faster. And cybersecurity gets more and more advanced, so you have to have scale, and you have to have all the skill sets necessary to manage all that.”

That doesn’t mean the smaller guys are not capable, Pace (pictured) said.

“They’re great, and you know they’ve done a great job for their customers,” he said. “It just gets harder to be one of those guys, and so there’s a lot of consolidation happening.”

Pace said he met Jackson Technical President Tim Jackson at a channel networking event a couple years ago in Tulsa, and over time the two discussed how they might partner to better serve their customers in the Tulsa area, where Centre Technologies had a small presence.

“Jackson Technical has a great brand and an unbelievable reputation in the Tulsa area, and really gives back to the community,” he said. “And Tim is not the kind to say this is all mine. He was more about how we can partner together to deliver great service to our customers.”

Over time, the two saw they were aligned in their thought processes and company cultures and in their belief that people are the keys to their success, Pace said.

“We were both focused on doing things the right way and taking ownership and providing the great IT to customers that they deserve,” he said. “So after what was essentially a very long ‘dating process’ of getting to know Tim and his wife and what they were driving, we realized it was so similar to what Centre was doing from a culture standpoint that it just made sense to come together, which is going to make Centre even stronger in the Tulsa area.”

Smaller MSPs see consolidation happening as the industry shifts from local players to regional players, Jackson told CRN.

“Looking forward, I essentially had a choice to make,” he said. “I could either staff up or team up. And after meeting Chris and some of his staff in their Houston office, I saw the culture there, and I saw a lot of similarities to what I had built, and so I knew there was something there we could build.”

Jackson Technical was originally formed with a plan to become a regional MSP, but after seeing how much time the head of one of its early clients spent on a plane, Jackson decided it was not the lifestyle he wanted.

“So I tempered my aspirations to, I want to be the best in Tulsa,” he said. “We’ve got the service down, we’ve got the technology down, and we’ve got the security down. I think some areas that we could improve on were compliance and AI in the cloud, those sort of things. [But] I really didn’t have that extra bandwidth to commit the resources to those areas that also take a lot of staff.”

Centre Technologies in June became majority owned by LightBay Capital, Pace said. LightBay is supporting Centre’s growth thesis of growing both organically and through mergers and acquisitions to dominate the region, he said.

“Jackson Technical is the first transaction we did with LightBay, and it couldn’t have gone better,” he said. “We’ve got more coming very soon. We’ve really invested in building out our M&A team so we can execute. … I want great things for my people, and I want great things for my customers. One of the things about Centre is we’re not just getting out there to acquire and be separate organizations. We really believe in a one-team culture within our organization.”

That, Pace said, means a focus on integrating the customers within Centre’s organization and delivering opportunity to both customers and employees.

“We want to enhance our culture with the addition of an organization like Jackson Technical so that everybody feels at home,” he said. “So we put a huge effort into what I would call doing it the right way, which is really integrating not just toolsets but really assimilating so that we work as one team moving forward.”

Beyond a major enlargement of its presence in the Tulsa, Okla., market, Jackson Technical brings additional skills, capability, and scale in the region, Pace said.

“We were already in Tulsa, but we believe in building a self-sustaining territory, and that’s really what enables us to be able to deliver true local touch to our customers,” he said. “And Jackson Technical brought that. The other thing to note is that Jackson Technical has an unbelievable reputation. It’s part of the community and has an unbelievable ownership of the employees of their clients’ environments.”

Both Centre Technologies and Jackson Technical are focused on cybersecurity and a layered security approach, Pace said. Centre also brings Jackson new capabilities in AI, particularly around compliance, he said.

One unique thing Jackson Technical brings to Centre Technologies is its own set of PSA (professional services automation) tools the company built, Pace said. Centre, in the meantime, uses the ConnectWise PSA toolset, he said.

“Centre is not out there to build our own PSA,” he said. “But that knowledge and that capability and that experience of viewing it from a customer’s perspective and building a PSA that really has worked very well for their business and making sure that they deliver personalized service, solve problems fast, and take ownership of clients’ environments. That will help us as we’re leveraging things like AI and operational efficiency within our business. They’re bringing that capability to us because they built their own PSA. They understand to the bottom the nuts and bolts.”

Jackson said building its own PSA served it well.

“When I started in ‘99, we didn’t have all these great off-the-shelf tools that you can buy now that cater to the MSP market,” he said. “I had to build my own ticketing system and client management system. I just created it myself. And it served us over the years. And there was one less vendor to pay.”

Going forward, Jackson said he will help with the transition of his company to Centre.

“Then maybe I’ll take a little bit of time off and see where I’m going to go from there,” he said. “I’m kind of keeping it open, but so far I’ve been working with Chris’ transition team, and they’ve been great. And I still like to talk tech a little bit.”

That said, Jackson said he doesn’t have any aspirations to do anything else.

“This is still the industry I love and know, but it is nice to have somebody else taking the reins, especially for things like the HR (human resources) side,” he said. “The things that are a little harder to do for a tech at heart.”

Even so, Jackson will be a part of Centre Technologies moving forward, Pace said.

Jackson Technical’s employees have an average tenure of over 10 years, with some being there over 20 years, he said.

“And Tim’s been around for 27 years, so you know through the relationships that he’s built in Tulsa and his involvement in the community, he’s always going to be part of Centre moving forward,” he said. “And so, where he doesn’t know exactly what he wants to do, he’s still going to be part of the business and part of our strategy from a local touch standpoint.”