After I sold my second integrator company Atrion Networking, a $156 Million dollar IT integrator located in the Northeast, I started doing some consulting work. Over the last few months I have participated at the Business Leadership Conference, CompTIA annual member meeting, ISC West and the Channel Partners Conference. Throughout these events I had a chance to connect with a lot of leaders of integrators across multiple industries. One of the most interesting things I observed was the focus on acquisitions as a primary growth strategy.
Over the years I have been preaching the partner, build, buy model. I felt starting with partnering allowed integrators to understand the new market they were considering entering into and at the same time begin to build some critical mass prior to making a significant investment of time and money. I have shared insights about the partnership model in previous articles related to becoming a facilitator of excellence. However it appears some are going right to acquisition and the darlings appear to be the IT integrators.