Bell Canada’s purchase of Halifax IT service company CloudKettle, announced Tuesday, is far from the first such overture Chief Executive Greg Poirier has received. What made this deal uniquely appealing, he said in an interview, was Bell’s track record of not interfering with management of the companies it acquires.

CloudKettle was founded in 2015 and sells consulting services on topics related to the Salesforce ecosystem, as well as some types of marketing software. In that time, the company has typically seen between 30 and 40 percent annual sales growth. Its clients are often software-as-a-service companies and have revenues in the billions of dollars.

Poirier’s interest in the deal was initially piqued at an event CloudKettle hosted last spring, during which leadership from Montreal-based cloud services specialists FX Innovation, or FXi, told him about their owner's experience of being sold to Bell. The details of CloudKettle's own sale have been modelled to a significant degree on the FXi transaction. The financial aspects of the CloudKettle transaction were not disclosed. 

“When I started the company roughly 10 years ago, I always knew that CloudKettle’s plan was to be acquired,” he said. “We were talking about the fact that we’d been working with Bell for quite some time … and that was the genesis of the discussion — that combination of us having been a strong supporting vendor for Bell over the last five or six years and the FXi team talking about their recent experience being acquired by Bell.”

Poirier’s company is one of two businesses being purchased by Bell simultaneously, the other being Mississauga, Ontario’s Stratejm. The Bell deal is also not Poirier's first acquisition; he was an executive at Fredericton’s Radian6 when it was sold to Salesforce for more than US$326 million in 2011, and went on to spend more than two years as that company’s internet marketing manager.

He said that in addition to offering access to vastly more resources than CloudKettle could manage on its own, he hopes the deal will also offer his own employees the same opportunities for career advancement he enjoyed when Radian6 was sold. And many of CloudKettle’s staff have pay packages that include stock, meaning they stand to profit directly from the Bell deal.

“This exit has a huge benefit for some of those team members,” Poirier said. “They’ll benefit financially from this transaction in the near term. But also, I hope it will give them the same elevated career opportunities that I received.

“Also our clients are going to benefit, because we’ll be able to offer some technology specialization, like Google Cloud platform service now, AWS, (Microsoft) Azure expertise with our friends at FXi.”

All of CloudKettle’s roughly 50 employees will stay with the company, and Poirier said he expects to add several more staff imminently. The bulk of CloudKettle’s clients have historically been publicly traded companies based in the United States and operating in industries with heavy regulatory burdens. Bell is an example of a similar company north of the border, which Poirier suggested could prove helpful for acquiring other, similar clients in Canada.

“We’re very fortunate,” he said. “We were approached by suitors probably almost on a weekly basis, in terms of people looking to acquire CloudKettle’s level of expertise and client base. Most of those people weren’t very interesting to us.

“Based on the feedback we got from FXi and their experience being acquired by Bell, we knew that Bell has left them largely to run the business as they knew best, because they’re experts at running their type of business. And that’s very much the approach Bell’s been taking with us. We’re going to continue to run CloudKettle as we have historically.”