The ground work for the merger between Navantis Inc. and Legend Corp., which agreed to merge late last month, may have been set a decade ago when John Kvasnic, founder and CEO of Navantis, saw his old office struck by lightening. The company was working feverishly on many projects that were nearing completion. Kvasnic found that 40 machines were basically fried.
With very little alternatives, Kvasnic called Andy Papadopoulos, founder of Legend Corp. and told him about his big problem.
Papadopoulos did not hesitate, according to Kvasnic. He and his team at Legend worked 46-hours straight to get Navantis operational again.
“He never gave us a bill,” Kvasnic said. “I hold Andy in very high regard and we see this merger as complimentary,” he added.
Under terms of the agreement, the combined companies will operate under the Navantis name and will be headquartered in Toronto.
Navantis was the No. 72 solution provider in CDN’s recently announced Top 100 Solution Providers reporting between $10 and $15 million in revenue. Both solution providers have made business bets on Microsoft technology and have reached Gold Certified partner status at Microsoft Canada, and Kvasnic believes the new company will move up the Top 100 rankings next year and settle between $20 to $25 million.
Papadopoulos told CDN that he has remained close friends with Kvasnic for more than 12 years. “I watched John (and his partner Jason Martin) build a great business with Microsoft over the years. We have worked on projects together in the past and we saw the synergies with clients. We share a lot of clients,” Papadopoulos said.
He added that Legend has been approached several times about mergers and acquisitions and for Papadopoulos it was never about the money and more about fit.
“The fit works well from our side and we work well with Navantis. There is not a lot of overlap,” he said.
One of the keys to this merger was the trend in the market place that customers were looking for solution providers who could provide solutions across the entire Microsoft stack of products.
“Clients are demanding more single source solution providers to work with. Now we have that value proposition with Microsoft. We can deal with the entire stack,” Papadopoulos said.
Kvasnic admitted Navantis did not have depth in infrastructure or on the architecture side.
“We were coming in later and building on top of that stack,” Kvasnic said.
“We had to make a decision to do it ourselves or partner with someone else. We’ve known Andy (Papadopoulos) for many years and I believe we have a strong cultural fit. This is a one-plus-one equals three scenario. There are a lot of complimentary set of skills at Legend and the nice part about this is that we are still small and agile,” he added.
Both Kvasnic and Papadopoulos informed Microsoft of the merger. Microsoft Canada told the two that the merger would open doors and address a gap that is currently in the market. The new 300 person Navantis now has scale and can work as a national provider for opportunities that in the past went to CGI or Avanade.
Lora Gernon, senior director of Microsoft Canada’s partner group, said she was excited to hear about the merger of two award-winning Microsoft Gold Certified partners.
“They can now offer customers a wider range of solutions across the entire Microsoft tool stack. This will pose a great competitive opportunity for them as it combines respective competencies in infrastructure and enterprise application development. We see mergers in all economies and the continued pursuit of innovation better positions any partner to weather difficult economic challenges. Our goal is to help any partner, extend their market reach, reduce costs, increase profitability, and deliver innovative solutions that help customers reach their full business potential.”
Jason Martin, the president and co-founder of Navantis added that Legend and Navantis together could now offer customers a one stop shop for outsourcing the entire life cycle management service as they can host a customer’s IT infrastructure.All operations will now run out of the Navantis office. Legend employees have all be retained by the new company.
Navantis is one of Microsoft’s top application development partners, while Legend offers The board of directors for Legend and Navantis, which included former Microsoft enhanced services and solutions to our customers, in addition to our core expertise in Active Directory, Exchange, Office Communications, System Center, and the newly released Azure and B-Pos lines.
The board of directors for Legend and Navantis, which included former Microsoft Canada president Frank Clegg, have approved the merger.
Kvasnic said that the goal for the new company is to become the strongest Microsoft solution provider in Canada.
Back in 2001, Navantis became Microsoft Canada’s first ever Gold partner in e-commerce.
In 2004, Navantis became the first ever winner of CDN’s Channel Elite Award for marketing.
Legend was also instrumental in helping Osteoporosis Canada along with other non-profit organizations switch to Microsoft technology from Novell.
