GreenPages Set To Accelerate Growth With M&A, Cloud Services Expansion With Abry Partners Recapitalization

‘We are going to use this capital to scale the business and do M&A,’ says GreenPages CEO Ron Dupler. ‘This is not a new chapter in our history. This is a new book. We are going to be doubling down on cloud, security, managed services. We are going to be very aggressive working with Abry on scaling the company organically and through mergers and acquisitions.’

Cloud solution provider superstar GreenPages is poised to aggressively scale the business with acquisitions and cloud services expansion in the wake of a game-changing market recapitalization with highly regarded MSP (Managed Service Provider) private equity powerhouse Abry Partners.

The recapitalization- which was completed on Dec. 11- gives the Kittery, Maine-headquartered GreenPages, No. 199 on the 2020 CRN SP500, outside capital for the first time in its 28 year history to scale the business in the midst of a booming cloud services market, said GreenPages CEO Ron Dupler.

“We are going to use this capital to scale the business and do M&A,” said Dupler. “This is not a new chapter in our history. This is a new book. We are going to be doubling down on cloud, security, managed services. We are going to be very aggressive working with Abry on scaling the company organically and through mergers and acquisitions.”

The capital necessary to do acquisitions going forward is going to be key for GreenPages, which has acquired at least one company every two years since Dupler took the helm 16 years ago. “The capital we now have access to is key to growing the business,” said Dupler. “We have been somewhat limited with our capital structure in terms of how aggressive we could be. This opens up a whole new range of possibilities in terms of our aggressiveness and the types of deals we can target.”

Dupler said he sees Boston-headquartered Abry – which has funded a number of prominent MSPs including NexusTek, Datapipe and Rackspace- as the perfect partner to help accelerate the GreenPages cloud services strategy going forward. “This gives us a smart team of people to collaborate with that knows this market well,” he said. “Our management team is going to be collaborating closely with them as we innovate and expand our portfolio with new offerings and new ways to serve our customers. That is a huge benefit to our customers.”

The cash infusion comes with GreenPages set to close out the year with its cloud business doubling in 2020. GreenPages’ Cloud Xcelerator Platform – a “blueprint” for moving customers quickly to AWS and Microsoft Azure with a scalable reference architecture – and its cloud consumption advisory services businesses are both growing at break-neck pace, said Dupler.

“What we’re seeing with the Xcelerator is it is providing a secure, scalable path toward a hybrid, multicloud infrastructure for customers,” he said. “That is helping customers get through the fear, uncertainty, doubt and inertia that has been an issue for some customers moving to cloud. After customers move to the cloud our consumption advisory services is helping customers optimize their cloud spend. There is a lot of overspend and customers don’t have the efficiency to effectively manage scaling cloud. There is a lot of complexity to doing the cloud right at not just the architectural level but also the business and economic level. Customers need someone like GreenPages to help them with that.”

The cash infusion could not come at a better time given the acceleration of digital transformation strategies that have taken place in the midst of the global pandemic, said Dupler. “What the pandemic did was validate and accelerate all the cloud, security and managed services we have been leaning into over the last several years,” he said. “Cloud is more important and the security paradigm has shifted with work from home and security threats which continue to proliferate. The companies able to survive and thrive during the pandemic have been those that have digitally transformed to become more agile.”

Dupler said he sees an opportunity to accelerate GreenPages’ all out charge to help companies move to hybrid cloud and public cloud architectures with the recapitalization. “This is all about helping our clients succeed, compete and win in the digital era,” he said. “We are seeing more and more new customers that are moving to cloud and are relying on us to help them adopt a more aggressive cloud strategy.”

Among GreenPages most prominent acquisitions are: The Norwell Group, a cybersecurity and business advisory services provider, in 2018 and LogicsOne – a virtualization powerhouse in 2012.

Dupler said he could not be more excited about the future given the market recapitalization and the collaboration with the Abry Partners’ team. “We think we have got a good strategy and grasp of the market opportunities and now we have a great partner with Abry,” he said. “It’s now time to get more aggressive. This is going to allow us to scale aggressively over the next five years.”