Mainline Buys Systems Integrator CompServ

Published: June 2, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Two weeks ago, server reseller Mainline Information Systems, of Tallahassee, Florida, acquired fellow reseller Cornerstone Systems, of Irvine, California, bringing together two of IBM's largest server resellers and two companies with particular expertise in mainframes and Power-based servers. Last week, Mainline reached across its home state of Florida and snapped up reseller and systems integrator CompServ.

CompServ, which is located in the Tampa suburb called Clearwater and which was founded in 1998, is an IBM reseller that pushes i5/OS, AIX, and Linux platforms as well as IBM's storage products, but which does not, like Mainline or its recent Cornerstone acquisition, push IBM System z mainframes. In addition to being an IBM partner, CompServ also sells Hewlett-Packard, EMC, Cisco Systems, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Symantec products.

Both Mainline and CompServ are privately held, so the financial details of the transaction were not divulged. CompServ has 47 employees, and Mainline did say that the resulting company will have more than 650 employees and an annual revenue in excess of $800 million. (Most of that revenue comes from the original Mainline company, with Cornerstone and CompServ kicking in relatively smaller bits.) At its current scale, Mainline is keeping pace with another big IBM reseller, Sirius Computer Solutions, which has about as many employees (around 600 at the end of 2007) and around $735 million in sales (projections in September made for the year-end in December).

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Partnerships! Partnerships! Partnerships!

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