Presidio Acquires BlueWater is the announcement.
"Presidio, Inc., a leading provider of professional and managed services for advanced IT solutions, announced today that it has acquired BlueWater Communications LLC, a provider of high-performance, holistic IT infrastructure solutions to growing companies. The senior executive team at Presidio also welcomed industry veteran, Bob Cagnazzi, CEO of BlueWater, as the new Chief Executive Officer of Presidio, Inc. effective immediately. Presidio is owned by American Securities LLC and management."
That makes for a very big VAR. Presidio has acquired Coleman Technologies, Ficomp, Networked Information Systems (NIS), Solarcom, and INX in the last few years, growing into a $2B VAR and one of Cisco's largest partners.
It seems to be about scale. How big can we get. How large can we grow, before we are almost worthless to the marketplace.
The big consulting houses like Accenture have their place - the Global 5000 treat them like a cousin - but boutique consulting shops have been growing for the last 5 years. Verticals and Specialization have their place.
Does this mean that Presidio will now compete against the carriers themselves? The carriers all want to sell managed services, but the hurdle to that is that VAR's sell managed servcies too. Yet carriers think their future is tied to VAR's.
It will be interesting to watch to see who wins. VAR's only use telcos for network services (dumb pipe). I don't see that changing any time soon, especially with the way telcos play with the accounts that the Channel brings in. Again, it will be interesting to see.
