Anexinet Acquiring SereneIT To Bring A ‘Better Autonomous Experience In IT’

SereneIT, founded by an HPE engineering veteran, specializes in automating core data center infrastructure and will significantly boost Anexinet’s engineering capabilities, executives tell CRN.

Channel powerhouse Anexinet has reached an agreement to acquire SereneIT, a solution provider specializing in data center automation and AI, to bolster its engineering capabilities and geographic reach, the chief executives of the two companies told CRN.

Blue Bell, Pa.-based Anexinet, No. 212 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500, and SereneIT, a three-year-old company based in the Atlanta area in Milton, Ga., are joining forces in part due to mutual ties to Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the executives said.

SereneIT founder and CEO Greg Tinker was a 16-year engineering veteran of HPE when he left the IT giant to found SereneIT in 2017. The 40-person company predominantly employs other former HPE engineers, as well, Tinker said.

[Related: Anexinet Doubles Down On Managed Services With NOC-SOC Offering]

Anexinet--which will employ approximately 300 following the acquisition--is an HPE Platinum partner, while SereneIT is an HPE Gold partner. Still, SereneIT is an “agnostic engineering firm” that also employs engineers who formerly worked for Dell and Cisco, Tinker said.

SereneIT’s focus is on bringing automation to data center infrastructure, with the company able to “write our automation code all the way down to the firmware layer,” Tinker said.

“We automate the core data center--servers, storage and network--and we do it by leveraging framework engines from Ansible, Puppet, Chef and Terraform from HashiCorp,” Tinker said.

In founding SereneIT, he said, “I knew that to make a difference in the market, we needed to give a better autonomous experience in IT. Just like Elon Musk has done for the auto industry. Everybody wants that automatic driving experience.”

Terms of the acquisition of SereneIT--which follows Anexinet’s own acquisition in June 2019, by private equity firm Mill Point Capital--are not being disclosed. Revenue details for the two companies are also not being disclosed.

Anexinet CEO Todd Pittman said that the acquisition will help to expand his company beyond its Philadelphia-centric footprint and into the southeastern U.S.--while also serving as “an incredible opportunity for us to bring even greater engineering talent and capability, as well as expanding it in areas like containerization, AI, machine learning.”

“We will now have a depth of engineering capabilities that Anexinet did not necessarily possess, with the team of engineers that Greg has assembled,” Pittman said.

As an example of the automation capabilities that SereneIT can bring, Tinker said that one of his firm’s customers--which runs about 5,000 bare-metal systems--previously required 14 employees over 18 months to do a firmware and BIOS patch of their entire ecosystem.

“We took that down to less than six months, with less than four people to do it,” Tinker said. “It’s almost 100 percent automated. That’s what we do.”

When it comes to engineering for AI capabilities, Tinker said there is tremendous opportunity to add value in data center environments with AI--including as a way to derive predictive information about the data center.

“Understanding when the next event is going to occur--that’s the big one for us,” he said. “We’re looking for the next event on the horizon.”