Canadian data centre and cloud solutions provider Benchmark Corp, and boutique technology services provider Arctiq Inc., who already partner on projects, have decided to take the relationship one step further and merge. The deal, whose terms have not been revealed, closed on the same day as it was announced, Jan. 31.
The merger, said Mike Morrison, founder and president of Arctiq, was sparked by a phone call from his long-time friend Kam Sabouri, managing director of Benchmark.
“We’ve been working more closely together as partners to deliver a combination of end-to-end services and procurement vehicles and adding a wider portfolio of solutions to our customers – the call from Kam just made sense immediately,” Morrison said in an interview with IT Business. “We work very well together as a team already, but also, once you pull back the layers a little bit, we’re very complementary to each other and can continue to add more to each other’s portfolio. And it just made a lot of sense, it didn’t take a lot of thinking.”
Luc Villeneuve, president of Benchmark, added that both companies had been in high growth mode, and resources were becoming tight. “We needed capacity; we tasked Shlomo [Bielak, his chief technology officer] months ago to triple our delivery team, and we just couldn’t find enough skill sets fast enough to grow that team at the speed of the customer demand. So when we started to look under the covers at what Mike has built, and what we had, it was a really amazing marriage of our teams together. So it just made sense. And I would like to add also that two amazing Canadian companies are coming together. I’m very proud of the fact that we are investing into the Canadian marketplace with 100 per cent employees from Canada.”
Employees from both organizations will be cross-trained on each other’s technologies, including Benchmark’s engineering effectiveness calculator, its equilibrium calculator and its new zero trust security tool.
“We’re not slowing down,” said Morrison. “Even as the joint organization together, there comes a time where organic growth just doesn’t satisfy demand. And in this case, by bringing the two companies together, it’s going to be more than the sum of its parts and allow us to deliver at an even larger scale to our enterprise customers.”
The board of directors of the amalgamated organization includes Sabouri as chairman, along with Morrison and Villeneuve. Villeneuve will continue as president, Benchmark CTO Shlomo Bielak will lead the chief technology officer’s office, and Arctiq’s CTO David Briand will be the chief operating officer tasked with implementing the vision and strategy of the new organization. A transition committee, led by Sabouri, is orchestrating the amalgamation into a single as yet unnamed entity, a process expected to take approximately 60 days.