Logicalis Australia chief executive Basil Reilly revealed that the company looked at 18 different acquisition targets before purchasing Thomas Duryea.
The companies, which announced the acquisition in December, held a joint function on Thursday at Ivy in Sydney to introduce their go-to-market strategy to customers and vendors.
Reilly shed some light on the motivation for the purchase. "It really came down to the brand and the reputation – TD had a great reputation with its customers around technology transformation and being really passionate about technology. They had a very good reputation around delivery.
"And also when we looked at the business, it was a quality business in terms of the numbers and the solutions, and then when we met the people we said, yes, we can work with these people," he added.
The companies are aiming to become a joint $120 million solutions provider, backed by Logicalis' parent, Datatec, the US$6.5 billion-turnover company that also owns Westcon.
Thomas Duryea managing director Andrew Thomas has another ambition – "to be the most admired IT company in this country".
He revealed that Thomas Duryea had been courted before. "We had been approached by a lot of different organisations and we always thought through how that would happen. We have seen good and bad acquisitions in our industry. There were approaches from organisations where we knew that we could stand up in front of our staff on the day we announced it, and they would already have been heading for the door."
Thomas said that after a year of negotiations "around my kitchen table", the two companies forged the deal, which is worth up to $17 million to Thomas Duryea's directors, CRN revealed in May.
The two companies have continued to operate as independent entities, but Reilly said they would complete the integration over the next 12 months. "We have a number of projects – we have to bring our financial systems together, our IT systems together. There is a big to-do list."
Combined, the companies have categorised their offer into eight practices: consulting and advisory; mobility and collaboration; data centre solutions, which is run by co-founder Evan Duryea; systems management and deployment; networking and security; Logicalis People; managed services; and cloud services.
Both companies have stressed the complementary nature of the merger – in fact only two staff have been made redundant.
Thomas Duryea national general manager Michael Chanter pointed to networking and security as a win from the deal. "As a capability, this has always been TD's weakness so it is fantastic to now have enterprise-grade capability brought in as part of the Logicalis team."
The biggest overlap is in managed services, but even here, Chanter spoke of complementary offers – Thomas Duryea with a 24/7 service desk in Melbourne, Logicalis with its 24/7 service desk offshore.
It's been a success story for the team at TD, who grew from humble beginnings more than 15 years ago as university students working at Dimension Data and went on to establish one of the industry's most respected IT solution providers with credentials across a broad swathe of vendors.
In a Q&A session with the luncheon's guest speaker and moderator, Peter FitzSimons, Andrew Thomas explained what drove the founders at the beginning.
"We were hearing from customers they wanted something different. They [customers] were buying automation. They were being sold these big tech dreams of automation, but we were the uni students in the warehouses doing it all manually, we knew this was not being done with any automation," said Thomas.
Thomas Duryea rode the virtualisation wave as the first reseller to bring VMware to Australia, and has since deployed VMware to more than 400 customers.
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