‘New’ Navisite Ready To Attack Midmarket

RDX executed three acquisitions over the last year that it has now consolidated under the Navisite brand. The MSP offers full-stack managed services, as well as expertise in hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

After a series of deals that unified several diverse MSP practices, a revamped and renewed Navisite looks to emerge as a powerhouse in bringing cloud services to the midmarket.

The “new Navisite” represents the consolidation of RDX, a full-stack services provider backed by Madison Dearborn Partners, and three MSPs that RDX acquired over the last year, which include the legacy Navisite business, CEO Marc Clayman told CRN. Clayman previously led TriCore Solutions before that company's acquisition by Rackspace.

RDX leaders decided Navisite was the best corporate moniker under which to package and bring to market the company’s comprehensive services portfolio—which spans infrastructure to applications and on-prem to public cloud, Clayman said.

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RDX bought Andover, Mass.-based Navisite last September from Charter Communications. The previous February, RDX had purchased clckwrk, a London-based specialist in AWS migrations and management, as well as ClearDB, a database-as-a-service provider.

The decision to coalesce those businesses around the Navisite brand was important as far as messaging both internally and with customers, Clayman said, “so we can all act and operate and organize” consistently.

The consolidation of the various MSPs has imparted Navisite with “the look of a global SI,” he said, though the company operates its business very differently.

RDX has traditionally served a large customer base that relies on expertise in complex managed services, including database, business intelligence, data integration, reporting, warehousing, and custom solutions.

That practice has natural synergies with Navisite’s legacy data center business and Microsoft Azure expertise, which culminated with an Azure MSP expert certification two years ago. Navisite also adds strong VMware chops to the mix, offering customers a hosted vSphere-environment ever since it abandoned a custom cloud platform it built many years ago.

Complementing those offerings, clckwrk brings the skillset to migrate customers, especially those running Oracle workloads, to Amazon Web Services.

Many customers want to deploy workloads in a private cloud hosted in Navisite data centers, then push some of those workloads into AWS or Azure, Clayman said.

Navisite doesn’t cater much to startups, and its customers are often on the conservative side. But many are starting to think about refactoring legacy applications, so the company is “starting to get into” cloud-native technologies like containers, Kubernetes and micro-services.

Google Cloud remains more “aspirational” for the new Navisite. It is exploring adding that partnership in the future.

Navisite sees itself building off a niche in the mid-market—serving customers that fall into an often-neglected gap between $100 million and $2 billion in size.

“We’ll continue to grow organically and threw strategic acquisitions,” Clayman told CRN.