Author Archives: Tori Pazda

The investment will enhance the client experience, facilitate geographic expansion and enrich Next Generation Platform automation capabilities

FOXBORO, MA. – January 28, 2021 Thrive, a leading provider of technology managed services, is pleased to announce that it has finalized a majority recapitalization with Court Square Capital Partners to reinforce its prominent market position. In addition to Court Square, Thrive’s existing financial sponsor, M/C Partners is continuing to participate alongside a substantial ownership stake by the company’s senior management team.

With their new partners, Thrive will accelerate its formidable investments in its Next Generation Technology including ServiceNow, Automation and AI.  In addition, the Company intends to expand its customer success, sales and marketing teams, technical talent, Cybersecurity, and other product offerings, in addition to continued geographic expansion, both organically and via acquisition.

“Thrive is proud to have built a company whose business model has been validated by a sophisticated technology services investor with a strong track record like Court Square.” said Rob Stephenson, Thrive CEO. “Our goal has always been to be viewed as a leader in the managed services space and this partnership will greatly benefit our existing customers, as well as provide an opportunity to expand our Cloud, Cybersecurity and ServiceNow-Powered Next Generation Managed Services Platform to new clientele.”

“Court Square is excited about the opportunity to partner with Thrive’s management team to continue to grow their managed services practice.” said Jeff Vogel, Managing Partner at Court Square.

“We’ve been actively pursuing an investment in this space for a long time and believe Thrive’s NextGen Platform provides a differentiated competitive edge in the marketplace,” added Matt Dennett, Principal at Court Square.

“M/C remains a strong advocate of Thrive, its management team, business model and continued trajectory of success.” said Gillis Cashman, Managing Partner at M/C Partners. “We’re thrilled for the opportunity to carry on as investors and partner with Court Square Capital Partners in this next phase of growth.”

Drake Star Partners served as financial advisor and Choate, Hall & Stewart LLP and the BRL Law Group served as legal counsel to the Company on this transaction.  Raymond James and 7Mile Advisors served as financial advisors and Dechert LLP served as legal counsel to Court Square Capital.  Alliance Bernstein provided financing for the transaction.

For more information about Thrive, click here.

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About Thrive

Thrive is a leading provider of NextGen managed services designed to drive business outcomes through application enablement and optimization. The company’s Thrive5 Methodology utilizes a unique combination of its Application Performance Platform and strategic services to ensure each business application takes advantage of technology that enables peak performance, scale, and the highest level of security. For more information, visit thrivenextgen.com

Thrive: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram

MEDIA CONTACT:

Stephanie Farrell, Director of Corporate Marketing

617-952-0289 | sfarrell@thrivenextgen.com

About Court Square

Court Square is a middle market private equity firm with one of the most experienced investment teams in the industry. Since 1979, the team has completed over 235 investments, including several landmark transactions, and has developed numerous businesses into leaders in their respective markets. Court Square invests in companies that have compelling growth potential within the business services, general industrial, healthcare, and technology and telecommunications sectors. The firm has $7.0 billion of assets under management and is based in New York, N.Y. For more information on Court Square, please visit www.courtsquare.com.

ABOUT M/C PARTNERS

M/C Partners is a private equity firm focused on small and mid-size businesses in the communications and technology services sectors. For more than three decades M/C Partners has invested $2.2 billion of capital in over 130 companies, leveraging its deep industry expertise to understand long-term secular trends and identify growth opportunities. The firm is currently investing its eighth fund, partnering with promising companies and empowering strong leaders to accelerate growth, optimize operations, and build long-term value. For more information, visit www.mcpartners.com.

Transaction Deepens Thrive’s Mid-Atlantic Presence in the Southern NJ, Philadelphia Market

The deal will give Thrive Networks’ Mid-Atlantic region a “founding staple.”

Thrive, backed by private equity firm M/C Partners, has acquired Apex IT Group, an IT managed solutions provider from Mount Laurel, New Jersey. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Transaction Deepens Thrive’s Mid-Atlantic Presence in the Southern NJ, Philadelphia Market

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – January 21, 2021 – Thrive, a premier provider of NextGen Managed Services, has acquired Apex IT Group, a leader in IT technology managed solutions for companies in the Greater Philadelphia region. This transaction further establishes Thrive’s significant presence in the Mid-Atlantic corridor by expanding their Cloud & Cyber Security focused NextGen platform into the Apex IT client base.

Apex IT Group, headquartered in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, delivers IT managed services through its proprietary process-driven methodology and its “Simple to Switch” client on-boarding process. They serve a variety of different small-to-mid-sized businesses in the Greater Philadelphia market with a strong focus upon service delivery, operational excellence and improving their client’s technology experience.

“I’m very excited to welcome the Apex IT Group, their employees and customers to the Thrive family,” said Rob Stephenson, Thrive’s CEO. “By bringing together our companies’ shared vision of technology innovation and a fervent dedication to IT service delivery, we’re providing a significant value proposition to Apex’s clients.”

“Thrive’s industry-leading NextGen Managed Services and ServiceNow automation platform, coupled with our technical proficiency in IT operations, will expand Apex’s role as a leader in the Greater Philadelphia and Mid-Atlantic region,” said Tina Mach, Apex IT Group’s CEO. “We’ve been very impressed with Thrive’s capabilities and are confident that our partnership will drive tremendous value to our customers via enhanced engineering depth, 24×7 operations, Cloud, SOC & Cyber Security expertise.”

Apex IT Group will be a founding staple of Thrive’s Mid-Atlantic region, overseen by Jason Shirdon, EVP & Regional General Manager, and formerly the President of EaseTech, a Columbia, Maryland MSP that Thrive acquired in late 2019.

For more information about Thrive, click here.

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About Thrive

Thrive is a leading provider of NextGen managed services designed to drive business outcomes through application enablement and optimization. The company’s Thrive5 Methodology utilizes a unique combination of its Application Performance Platform and strategic services to ensure each business application takes advantage of technology that enables peak performance, scale, and the highest level of security. For more information, visit thrivenextgen.com

Thrive: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram 

MEDIA CONTACT:

Stephanie Farrell

Director of Corporate Marketing

617-952-0289 | sfarrell@thrivenextgen.com 

About Apex IT Group

George Mach founded Apex IT Group in 2007. With over a decade in business, Apex IT Group boasts consistent growth and adaptation to changing and evolving markets, enjoying an elite classification as a “World Class” Managed IT Service Provider (MSP). While IT providers bend to satisfy trends and hot-topic buzzwords, Apex has continued to hone its proprietary processes while successfully contributing to job growth and workforce development in technology.

Specializing in helping SMBs in the Delaware Valley, its IT management programs help clients gain total command over technology with core services around complete IT management and support including cloud computing and cybersecurity.

Thrive The Unanimous Choice for IT Infrastructure Implementation. The annual listing of 10 companies that are at the forefront of providing Capital Market consulting/services and transforming businesses.

Interested in learning more? CONTACT US TODAY!

SolarWinds, a monitoring software company, recently released information regarding a security incident that impacted their enterprise monitoring application, Orion.  Orion is one of the most common monitoring applications used by internal IT teams and MSPs all over the world. However, Thrive does NOT use Orion in any of our service offerings, but rather a different product called “N-Central”.  This is a completely different platform, formerly known as N-able, which was purchased several years ago and runs as a separate division within SolarWinds.  The source code for Orion and N-Central are not shared and they each run independently on separate operating systems.

Thrive has spoken directly with SolarWinds leadership and they confirmed to us that their investigation has found no threats to N-Central or other SolarWinds MSP products.  In addition to that investigation, the Thrive Security Team has completed our own review of this exploit.  Based on our analysis of currently available public information, we determined that the N-Central technology was NOT susceptible to the same attack methodology that was used against Orion.

If any of our Customers are running SolarWinds Orion on your networks or within your organizations, please use the following link to get more details on how to remediate the issue, along with some additional background on the exploit: https://www.solarwinds.com/securityadvisory

If you have any questions, please feel free to CONTACT US.

As the volume of suppliers continues to grow at a rapid rate, Partners have access to a multitude of different technologies and services, with Master Agents providing expert guidance and a strong set of resources to aid in the selection process. The negative side of this influx of vendors is that without a carefully considered approach, it creates an environment where the focus is less on understanding each Partner’s unique needs and each Supplier’s core offerings and instead limits it to the singular opportunity.  This narrow view contributes to less relationship development and continuity within the Channel, something Thrive believes is vital to the partner experience and to winning business.

Thrive has worked over the past year to build an account ownership element to our Channel Program to provide added value to our Partners and enhance their user experience. As a part of this new approach, when a partner reaches out to us in any form, they are assigned to a Thrive Sales Representative who then becomes the dedicated POC for that Partner moving forward. We also set up introductory calls that focus solely on understanding each Partners’ business, expertise, and client base to form a high-level partnership strategy and maximize efficiency.  Our goal is simply to provide a user friendly, relationship-driven experience for our partners as we continue to help guide them toward finding the right solutions for their clients.

Yes, the goal is always to put ourselves in a position to receive opportunities that fit our core services and then work with our partners to win that business.  However, for us it goes one step further.  Regardless of whether the given opportunity is even a fit, we want to ultimately form a lasting relationship with that partner, one that generates repeat business, and gives us a chance to most effectively align with them by understanding the key elements of their business.  This added cadence also enables us to be available for guidance and to exhibit our consultative approach to their customers. This approach has resulted in an ever-growing group of partners that understand exactly when to bring Thrive into an opportunity, as well as a dramatically increasing win rate.

We look forward to continued Channel success, and want all of our partners to know that we are always available.

Interested in learning more? CONTACT US TODAY!