MSP Dataprise, With Focus On U.S. Expansion, Acquired By PE Firm

'There are going to be a few, nationwide, coast-to-coast MSP players. We are very confident that Dataprise will be counted in the handful that will be successful. We’re thrilled to be in that race,' Dataprise founder and CEO David Eisner tells CRN.

Massive solution provider Dataprise announced today that it was acquired by private equity firm Trinity Hunt Partners in a deal that the company hopes will help it to realize its national ambitions.

“For them they were looking for a larger, well-run, profitable MSP, and for us, we were looking for a growth-oriented partner that knows the sector,” Dataprise founder and CEO David Eisner told CRN. “Not everyone we spoke with is a student of the sector, and had a shared vision of growth. They’re a great student of the industry.”

Trinity Hunt Partners, a private equity firm out of Dallas said it spent more than three years looking at IT managed service providers, meeting with more than 50 companies before it settled on buying Dataprise.

“Dataprise’s commitment to service quality and technology thought leadership are true differentiators,” Blake Apel, a partner at Trinity Hunt, said in a statement. “We believe Dataprise is best-in-class in the industry, and we plan to support the company as it grows through acquisitions to become a market leading national managed services player.”

Eisner said while Trinity Hunt did its homework over years, once it settled on Dataprise the two companies completed the deal in a matter of weeks. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“From LOI to close was eight weeks,” he said. “I can’t go into too much detail, but when we did pair up it went pretty fast … The MSP sector is red hot. Right up there with the MSSP sector on the security side. The last couple years we’re seeing this first serious maturation process. We’ve been tracking, and we’ve seen the birth of, several nationwide platform players and Dataprise is now one of them.”

The Rockville, Md.-based MSP has offices in 12 cities, and manages more than 1,000 business customers across the U.S. It is a Gold-level partner with both Dell and Microsoft and has 300 technicians with more than 800 certifications. The company also runs an MSSP business and hosts a Type 2 Security Operations Center (SOC).

The company’s management team will remain intact following the deal, and it will continue to be run from its Maryland headquarters. Going forward, the company, established in 1995, hopes to not only expand its customer base, but also its geographic reach.

“You have a lot of smaller MSPs that are unaffiliated (without private equity investment) and then you have a few, less than a dozen that really have nationwide aspirations,” Eisner said. “There’s only a handful that are going to have an attempt at, and potential to be a nationwide, successful platform player. I think what this investment gives us is that potential, starting in our geography which is Washington D.C., mid-Atlantic, then looking further afield.”

Dataprise is No. 343 on the 2019 CRN Solution Provider 500. It was also named to CRN’s Managed Service Provider 500 and Tech Elite 250. Eisner said Trinity Hunt saw Dataprise as one of the few organically-built MSPs of a size that made it worth investing in. Eisner said on its end, Dataprise talked to “scores of potential partners,” however Trinity Hunt gave them the best opportunity to build nationally.

“It's an exciting time for the industry. There are going to be a few coast-to-coast MSP players,” Eisner said. “We are very confident that Dataprise will be counted in the handful that will be successful. We’re thrilled to be in that race.”