It’s been nearly a year since CDW Corp. of suburban Chicago bought Berbee Information Systems, one of the country’s largest independent IT solutions providers, for the tidy sum of $175 million in cash.
Paul Shain, who was Berbee’s CEO, stayed on with the company to manage it within CDW. Jim Berbee, who founded the company in his garage 14 years ago, is now a first-year medical student at Stanford University.
CDW Berbee (the company’s new moniker) recently announced plans to open a 70,000-square foot “cutting edge” enterprise data center and office building next year in the Fitchburg Technology Campus. The new buildings will create at least 50 new jobs and double the company’s data center capabilities.
Shain, a former Robert W. Baird investment banker, said Berbee has grown about 20 percent in both revenue and staff since the merger. He said he is pleased with the union. Headquartered in Fitchburg, the company has more than 900 employees in 11 offices around the Midwest. In 2006, it had revenues of $427 million.
“The combination of these two companies has gone very well and we will celebrate our one-year anniversary on Oct. 12,” Shain said. “Our business has remained exceptionally strong and we are in the midst of a number of integration strategies.
“We’ve rolled out a number of nice tools to the Berbee side of the equation and similarly, we have taken some of our best practices and move them over to the CDW side of the equation.
“All in all, our revenue is up, our earnings are up and our head count is up. I’m pleased to say that we are declaring success.”
Still, Shain said, there were a few bumps along the way. But nothing terribly unexpected, he added.
“It was relatively seamless, though I don’t think you can go through a combination like this without having a few hiccups,” he said. “A lot of it was process issues and differentials, things that cause you to take a little pause.”
In addition, he said his company also had to make the switch of going from a private firm to a public company and adapt to the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires much more separation of financial duties.
“We had looked at that, but as a private company we were not required to implement its rules. And frankly, we weren’t big enough to do implement some of them. Now we have had to reengineer some processes to adapt to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley.”
WisBusiness Editor Brian Clark interviewed Shain in late September.
