Insight-SADA Deal Makes Tony Safoian Richest Man in the Channel

While every day, Channel Futures writes about mainstream mergers and acquisitions taking place among channel partners, the size of the SADA purchase by Insight is a once-in-a-lifetime deal.

There are few deals, if any, we can recall of this size when it comes to a closely held channel partner organization built and run by a single family. Insight is paying $410 million to buy SADA with cash and funds derived from an asset-based lending (ABL) facility. The SADA owners have the ability to earn an additional $390 million on top of that purchase price in earnouts and incentives from hitting specific financial goals.  

At a possible peak of $800 million, that would make this deal one of the biggest single payouts for the founders of a partner organization in the history of the channel, instantly turning the Safoian family into one of the wealthiest in America. Certainly, SADA fetched a price way above what other partner organizations have attracted in the past few years.

Tony Safoian’s parents founded the firm and he has spent recent years building the organization into a cloud-focused partner that went from a multicloud strategy with AWS, Azure and Google, to one dedicated solely to Google’s Cloud offerings. Four years ago, the company sold its Azure practice to channel partner CoreBTS to focus solely on Google Cloud, where it received marketing, sales and strategic support from Google, which was looking to increase its channel presence.

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The company was formed in 2000 by Annie Safoian and her husband Hovig, and in 2003 became a family-owned and operated company. The Safoian family emigrated to Los Angeles in 1987, making this an example of true American success story.

See our slideshow above for the long-lasting impact of this deal, more on why Insight wanted SADA, and thoughts from one of the preeminent M&A advisory firms on what makes this deal so important.