Marco, Inc., recently announced that it has purchased the hosted cloud services business of St. Paul-based IT solutions provider InCompass IT for an undisclosed sum.
 
St. Cloud-based Marco said the deal was part of a regional and national expansion. Marco is a rapidly growing business, having acquired eight different businesses since 2010; three of which were based in Minnesota.
 
The InCompass IT deal closed October 1, following the company’s physical expansion of its St. Louis Park office by 2,500 square feet to accommodate the growth—bringing the office to 15,000 total square feet.
 
Marco specializes in data networking and security, converged voice applications, print and document management, managed services, audio/video services, and video surveillance systems.
 
“This offering of hosted applications and infrastructure augments our well-established managed IT services division and allows us to expand hosted/cloud services to our 18,000 customers,” Marco CEO Jeff Gau said in a statement.

 
InCompass has provided hosted applications and “infrastructure as a service” for nearly two decades. According to Marco, InCompass led the industry with the adoption of remote support technologies and implementation of managed services and was early to initiate cloud solutions with fully hosted desktops.
 
“[This deal] also allows our customers, when appropriate, to transfer IT from a large capital investment to a much more affordable and scalable monthly operating expense and gain 24/7 support from Marco’s local call center,” Trevor Akervik, director of managed services at Marco, said in a statement.
 
Marco has 700 total employees, 10 of whom were added through the InCompass deal. According to Marco Chief Financial Officer Jennifer Mrozek, all of InCompass’ staff joined Marco at the St. Louis Park office, excluding the InCompass owner—who will retain the IT consulting portion of the business and continue operating under its same name.
 
Marco said it will now occupy InCompass’ existing data center space in the CenturyLink building in Minneapolis.
 
According to Mrozek, Marco plans to add about a dozen new employees over the next year to build out the company’s newly acquired cloud services.
 
Marco’s most recent annual revenue totaled $150 million, and the company has a five-year average revenue growth rate of 29 percent, according to Mrozek.
 
Marco was founded in 1973 and currently has offices in Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota and Iowa.