As the saying goes every cloud has a silver lining. That is what happened to nine former NexInnovations’ employees, who were part of the solution provider’s consulting team. They were all hired as a group by Quartet Service, a Toronto-based IT outsourcing firm.
Glen Landry, the former national director for professional services at NexInnovations and now the director of consulting solutions at Quartet, is one of the nine individuals to recently come on board with the Quartet team. He explains that once all of the terminations were up to date at NexInnovations, the team sat down and decided to stay as a group to find a new workplace together.
“When you find a team that works well together, it just made sense for us to keep that group together,” Landry said. “It’s hard to find good people and when you find them you don’t want to lose them.”
Landry admits he knew NexInnovations was going through some significant difficulties but he says he didn’t have any idea that things would end up this way.
“I can’t believe [NexInnovations] wasn’t able to come up with an equitable agreement with Tech Data,” Landry said. “The way it happened and how quickly it happened is both a shock and a tragedy. I was with the company for six and a half years.”
Rob Bracey, president and CEO at Quartet Service, says he also had a feeling that NexInnovations was in trouble, but says he was unaware that the company was dangling so close to the edge.
“[Their] overheads and inventories were huge and when you looked at this and their staff, it’s probably something you could have smelt years ago,” Bracey said. “I guess things caught up with them and it was only a matter of time before this happened.”
Quartet is a privately-owned and operated company that specializes in the mid-tier market space that serves companies operating in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and provides Internet, telephony and data services to them. Bracey says Quartet currently has about 160 clients and says before the former NexInnovations employees joined his team, customers were asking for more technical leadership, guidance and more consultative services than what the company was then able to provide.
“With this new consulting team, we can provide engineering and consulting guidance,” Bracey said. “We’re focused on the mid-tier corporate market, but we hope the new team will help us enhance our offerings to the large enterprise market too. I wouldn’t be surprised if our business will double over the next year. Our revenue base is mostly recurring revenue, but we expect to increase our hardware sales and project sales as well.”
Landry says the former NexInnovations consulting team brings a set of senior and advising skills in addition to a new depth and breadth to advanced technology areas surrounding Microsoft and Cisco products and solutions.
He added, the team’s decision to move to a company such as Quartet instead of other top end solution providers in the area was made because the company has an undeniable entrepreneurial spirit and a great synergistic presence.
“We’re focused on Microsoft and Cisco and project management disciplines,” Landry said. “We’re also going to work with Quartet customers on their wireless, unified communications, security and management needs. We’re also going to focus on extending the capabilities of [Quartet’s] existing client base.”
Up next for Quartet is the building of a lab and data centre beside their Toronto corporate office, Bracey said. The lab is set to open on December 5th. As for branching off outside of the GTA areas, Bracey says it’s definitely a possibility moving forward.
“We expect to do more work across Ontario,” he said. “We’ve already had a couple customers ask us to expand but we remain shy on that. We think we’ll primarily focus on Toronto because there are still lots of opportunities here. From there, we may go through Ontario and from there, we will see. We don’t want to get too big too fast.”