Managed services News
Coretelligent CEO On Building A Platform MSP And Formulating An Acquisition Strategy
Joseph F. Kovar
‘Coretelligent is now one of the largest platform MSPs in the U.S. Very few MSPs have been able to achieve our level of size in terms of clients and team members, and in terms of revenue, coming from a bootstrapped, individually founded organization,’ says Kevin Routhier, Coretelligent founder, president, and CEO.
The Power Of The Platform
Coretelligent was founded in 2006 as one of thousands of MSPs in the U.S. However, Kevin Routhier in 2016 made a move to fuel growth by accepting private equity money and transforming the company into a platform MSP. And five years later, Routhier -- the firm’s founder, president and CEO -- brought in a second private equity firm to accelerate growth.
With the funding, Coretelligent became a platform MSP. Platform MSPs build their business models around acquiring other MSPs with a goal of scaling their managed services business beyond what smaller MSPs typically can achieve.
For Coretelligent, that has meant a total so far of seven acquisitions, including the recent acquisition of Advanced Network Products (ANP) in a move to expand its reach to the mid-Atlantic area while picking up a solid talent and customer base.
[Related: Preparing An MSP For Private Equity: ITPartners+ CEO Lays It Out]
No dollar value for that acquisition was provided.
ANP provides a geographical expansion and a team of IT professionals who can help Coretelligent continue its digital transformation and AI expansion, Routhier told CRN. Don’t be confused by that company’s name, he said.
“The name Advanced Network Products, by the way, is a little misleading because they are a full service organization,” he said. “They’re not just out there reselling network equipment.”
Coretelligent remains focused heavily AI and end-to-end services including a wide range of support, compliance, security, managed services, and digital transformation services that includes the company’s own AI capabilities, Routhier said.
That focus on AI, which requires the kind of scale the average MSP does not have, is key to Coretelligent’s future, Routhier said.
“When we talk about AI, we’re really enabling the analysis and the in-depth business analytics and intelligence in the extraction of that and bringing it to the forefront,” he said. “That is here now. It’s steeped in what we are doing in our approach to digital transformation and the continued exponential growth of the data within any organization. This we believe will be the one of the primary responsibilities of MSPs over the next five to ten years.”
The MSP business is a rapidly-changing one. Read CRN’s interview with Routhier to see how platform MSP Coretelligent is helping lead the change.
