Optimus Solutions Makes Two Acquisitions

In the span of just two days, Norcross, Ga.-based Optimus Solutions (No. 281 on the 2005 VARBusiness 500) made two acquisitions, buying Mahre Consulting, also of Norcross, and Eagle Technology Consultants of Atlanta. Terms of the acquisitions were not disclosed.

Mahre Consulting is an enterprise IT consulting organization specializing in business-process management and enterprise-application integration. The deal is expected to strengthen Optimus' consulting services. Though Optimus, an IBM Premier Business Partner, has a strong vendor product business, Optimus chief executive Mark Metz told VARBusiness recently that services are seeing increasing demand.

"Customers don't want to be tied to one vendor," Metz says. "We've seen a lot of demand around simplifying IT infrastructure, server consolidation and virtualization."

Specifically, Mahre Consulting has developed several automated, Web-based financial-intelligence solutions as well as other business-process solutions that are designed to monitor and track internal systems. Mark Mahre, former president, CEO and partner of Mahre Consulting, will now serve as executive vice president of Optimus.

"Applying our powerful business-process modeling skills together with Optimus' enterprise-architecture expertise enables our customers to align business objectives, optimize processes, and better manage resources and critical business information," Mahre said in a press statement.

A day after that announcement, Optimus introduced yet another addition in Eagle Technology Consultants, another IT consulting firm that specializes in the design and development of custom Internet, intranet and extranet solutions. Eagle, also an IBM Premier Business Partner, brings its status as a Blackberry Alliance and Microsoft Gold Certified partners to Optimus along with its consulting services. Eagle Technology Consultants specializes in building custom applications for Research in Motion (RIM) Blackberry devices and wireless devices based on both IBM Domino and Microsoft .Net technologies.

"Joining forces opens the door to new business opportunities in which we leverage our Microsoft expertise into the Optimus client base," said Ted Chappell, newly appointed vice president of Optimus Solutions and previous managing partner at Eagle, in a press statement.