MSP 501 Profile: TPx Tells a Tale of Growth

Company Name: TPx Communications (“TPx”)
Company MSP 501 Rank: 2
CEO: Dick Jalkut
Headquartered: Los Angeles, CA
Primary Services:

Twitter: @TPxComm

Last week, TPx Communications, número dos on our 501 winner list, announced something pretty big. Leading private equity firm, Siris, has agreed to acquire the managed services provider.

TPx’s Dick Jalkut

The acquisition is a testament to the transformation TPx has completed and the position the provider is in to take advantage of the growth opportunity in the UCaaS, CCaaS, managed WAN, managed security and other managed IT markets.

M&A has always been an important strategy for TPx as they themselves have completed nine acquisitions over their history, with the most notable and transformational being the DSCI acquisition back in 2016.

That acquisition enabled TPx to operate its own UCaaS platform, expand nationally and fortify its managed IT solution set with additional resources and expertise that have been the catalysts to their expansion into cybersecurity, backup and more.

“We expect we’ll take advantage of more opportunities in the future to expand our product catalog and coverage,” said Dick Jalkut, president and CEO, TPx.

Here, Jalkut talks about TPx’s biggest growth areas, market momentum and driving business decisions.

Channel Futures: Considering your recent acquisition, what do you see as your biggest growth areas and potential over the next year?

Dick Jalkut: We’ll continue to see rapid growth in UCaaS, CCaaS and managed IT services, mainly managed SD-WAN, managed security and managed backup services. All of these services are in markets growing at double-digit rates, which we expect to continue for the next three to five years. Market momentum coupled with TPx’s increased success rates in selling and delivering these complex solutions and doing so on a national basis will drive growth. CCaaS, for example, is a new offer launched in 2019 and we are already seeing attractive UC and contact center hybrid solutions where midmarket customers are looking for an integrated solution for their entire enterprise. Similarly, TPx is a leader in managed SD-WAN services and we continue to make significant progress with our other managed IT services.

CF: What was the single biggest technology or business decision that drove your company’s growth last year? How did it do so?

DJ: SD-WAN has been a game-changing technology for the industry and for TPx. Because of the many use cases it fulfills, SD-WAN has enabled TPx to offer WAN, UC and SIP voice services on a nationwide basis “over the top” while maintaining quality and strict SLAs.

TPx’s SD-WAN solution, MSx for WAN, is a fully managed, subscription-based service that maximizes our customers’ existing bandwidth resources, providing quality of service (QoS) over any WAN connection and increasing the performance of mission-critical applications. It supports any transport type (Ethernet, fixed wireless, TDM, DSL/cable, and 4G LTE) on any network regardless of …

… service provider, including the option to “bring your own bandwidth” (BYOB) for national off-net connectivity. This gives distributed organizations turnkey entry to an increasingly popular networking solution with a unique set of features.

TPx’s managed services platform, enabled by SD-WAN, starts when an easy-to-deploy, software-programmable device is plugged into any customer broadband connection to the Internet. Almost immediately, the TPx cloud pushes the exact configuration needed to fill the customer’s requirements to the device and, within minutes, the ordered services are up and running. This is a significant departure from the complex, expensive installations of hardware and cables typically needed to provision new services.

What’s particularly important with SD-WAN is that it has enabled TPx to sell other services in places and situations where it otherwise would have needed to provide a circuit to ensure quality. This has led to growth not only in SD-WAN but also in UC solutions as well.

CF: We see a lot of new, different types of competition cropping up, particularly with private equity firms snapping up MSPs left and right. What type of company do you find yourself competing with nowadays?

DJ: TPx competes more regularly with the pure-play UCaaS providers for UC and contact center solutions and regional MSPs in the market for managed IT solutions. While we may have competed with them in the past, the combination of both groups makes up the majority of our new competition and have replaced the ILECs, cablecos and CLECs of the past.

CF: Getting personal for a moment, what specific challenges have you as a business owner faced and overcome in your career? 

DJ: Having been a successful regional CLEC for many years, the most challenging endeavor we’ve encountered and largely overcome has been transforming into a national managed service provider.  This has forced us to rethink the entire business while continuing to growth through it all. We believe our accomplishment in this area is evident with more than 60 percent of our revenues in managed services today and the fact that almost none of our peers of the past has successfully made the transition like we have.