MSSP Nuspire Adds Consulting With GBprotect Buy

‘The good dovetail is their consulting arm, the way they’ve gotten in with new customers and generated business with compliance consulting,’ Nuspire CEO Saylor Frase tells CRN about the company’s purchase of GBProtect.

Managed security services provider Nuspire has acquired GBprotect, as well as that company’s Security Operations Center, to expand its compliance and consulting abilities, Nuspire CEO Saylor Frase told CRN.

“The good dovetail is their consulting arm,” he said, “the way they’ve gotten in with new customers and generated business with compliance consulting. ... We do our customer advisory boards every year, and it’s come up the last two years as something that our competitors are doing, and that customers want and need. Seeing GBProtect had already figured that out and was successful with it, and they have some really good talented staff around that, we saw that as a great add-on to what we’re doing.”

The deal closed on April 2 but was announced Thursday; terms of the deal were not disclosed. Frase told CRN that Nuspire has an annual revenue of about $30 million while GBProtect earns about $7 million in revenue per year. He said the biggest attraction for Nuspire was GBprotect’s compatible culture and its talented roster.

“The most important thing is the expertise around staff,” he said. “The big bottleneck on growth, the big differntiator as far as competitive advantage, is around the competency level and the scale of your staff. That was a big factor. GBProtect has a fantastic and deep engineering-focused staff.”

Nuspire has offices in Michigan, Cincinnati and 13 other locations including two in South Africa. The deal increases the total number of SOCs owned by Nuspire from three to four, and fits in well with its “disciplined” and “conservative” acquisition strategy, Frase said.

“We’ve had an inorganic M&A strategy that we started a little over a year ago,” he said. “When looking at the M&A stuff, we wanted to not just do the typical rollup and look at revenue and do it that way. We wanted to first look at organizations that had a really good dovetail on services, and GBProtect really does.”

Frase said in addition to being a great security firm, GB is a top service provider with its consulting and “CIO-as-a-service” business.

“They’ve done a successful job at using that to develop new business,” he said. “That’s something we’ve looked at before. There’s definitely a need on our side, and among our enterprise customers there’s been a lot of ask for that. We saw that as a really good expertise set that would add well to what we’re doing.”