Channel News
CJ Fairfield
‘We’re not just looking for logos, we’re looking for people who understand the industries in which their customers operate and understand how to solve problems within those industries, not just sell technology,’ says Kyle Lanzinger, president of U.S. and Canada at Fulcrum.
Fulcrum IT Partners completed its fourth global acquisition this year, buying F3 Technology Partners and beefing up Fulcrum’s presence in the healthcare and financial services verticals.
West Hartford, Conn.-based F3, which was on CRN’s 2022 MSP 500 list, will bring over about 30 employees in the acquisition. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Kelly Carter, chief strategy officer of Toronto-based Fulcrum, said F3 brings Fulcrum into new verticals that it hasn’t been in, or hasn’t been strong in, before.
The closeness F3 has to their customers was also attractive.
“[They’re] focusing on outcome-based solutions for our customers versus just selling them technology,” she told CRN in an interview. “We want partners who have that close relationship with their customers and we can build on that and bring them solutions that really work for them versus selling them a technology product.”
[Related: Fulcrum IT Partners Plans Up To Six More Acquisitions This Year]
F3’s financial services vertical is one that particularly stood out, said Kyle Lanzinger, president of U.S. and Canada at Fulcrum, which owns a host of other MSPs.
“We’re not just looking for logos, we’re looking for people who understand the industries in which their customers operate and understand how to solve problems within those industries, not just sell technology,” Lanzinger said. “These guys know that really well to the same degree that our other sister companies that we’ve acquired have the same level of depth in other industries, so it complements quite nicely.”
He added that F3’s “strong presence and successful track record” in the healthcare and financial services verticals firmly complements Fulcrum’s existing capabilities and further enables the company to deliver more value to its customers.
F3 is a leader in cloud, data center, and automation/DevOps solutions that provide the best business outcomes to their customers.
“We’re just finishing up our 15th year and every year has seen exponential growth, quite honestly,” Tom Colleary, president of F3 Technology Partners, told CRN. “We’ve gotten to a level where scale starts becoming an issue and Fulcrum provides us scale in a lot of different areas. They’ll provide solutions to bring to our customers and things like security where we’re not really strong in [as well as] this whole consumption model that we’re all ready to start dipping our toes in the water of. Then we also have some customers that are asking us to go global, and so Fulcrum checked all those boxes for us.”
He added that he had to make sure the acquisition was a perfect fit for his employees, vendors and customers alike.
“That’s one of the other things we really liked about this,” Colleary said. “It allows us to remain agile and nimble and keep the culture of F3. We were not interested in just being absorbed by other competitors in our marketplace.”
He said both F3’s customers and vendors are excited as it brings more opportunity for both of them in the market.
“We really wanted the culture and independence that that these guys were allowing us to do,” he said.
