Across North America, PE-backed platforms have been on a multi-year acquisition spree. Industry trackers recorded hundreds of MSP deals in 2025 alone, with private equity involved in the majority of disclosed transactions. The model is straightforward: buy founder-led firms with sticky recurring revenue, standardize tools and processes, centralize support, expand the footprint, and eventually exit at a higher multiple.
Alberta has not been immune. In 2025, Evergreen Services Group (backed by Alpine Investors) acquired three Alberta MSPs, including long-standing Calgary firm The ITeam, folding them into its Lyra Technology Group. Other platforms and Canadian PE groups have been active in the broader IT services space as well. The pattern is familiar: local companies with decades of client relationships get absorbed into larger platforms headquartered elsewhere.
On paper, it sounds reasonable. More resources. Better tools. National scale. Deeper cybersecurity capabilities. In practice, the experience for many clients is different.
We have lived this firsthand
For years we worked closely with a Calgary company that provided specialized support for SolidWorks, the engineering software several of our clients rely on. The relationship was simple and effective. When something broke or a complex configuration needed attention, we (or our client) picked up the phone and spoke with the same knowledgeable person who already understood the environment. Problems got solved through conversation, not process.
Then the company was acquired by private equity. The change happened fast.
The direct phone call disappeared. Support now requires submitting a ticket into a centralized desk. Responses often come from someone who has never worked with that particular client before. Instead of talking through the issue, the default is to send a knowledge-base article. The personal relationship that made the support valuable is largely gone, while the costs have gone up.
This is not an isolated story. It is the predictable outcome of the PE playbook applied to service businesses. When a local provider is acquired, several things frequently change:
- The technicians who knew your environment, your quirks, and your history often leave or get reassigned. Institutional knowledge walks out the door.
- Support shifts from a relationship to a ticket queue. Response times lengthen, and the person on the other end has never seen your systems.
- Proactive, relationship-driven work gets deprioritized in favour of metrics that look good on an EBITDA slide.
- Pricing and packaging tend to standardize upward.
- Decision-making moves further from Calgary and closer to the fund’s model.
The incentives are the problem
Some platforms execute better than others. But the structural incentives of private equity are clear. The hold period is finite. The goal is scale and margin expansion. Client experience is a means, not the end.
Calgary businesses, especially in energy, professional services, and mid-market operations, tend to value continuity and accountability. They notice when the people who understood their operations are no longer there. They notice when a simple issue that used to take an hour now takes a day. They notice when the conversation shifts from “what do you need?” to “here’s the new standard package.”
Independent, locally owned firms operate under different incentives. We live here. Our reputation is local. Long-term client relationships are the business, not a line item to be optimized and flipped. We can stay vendor-agnostic because we’re not optimizing for a preferred-vendor stack that maximizes platform margins. We can prioritize the client’s actual outcome over the quarterly utilization target.
This is not nostalgia for smallness. Scale has real advantages in cybersecurity tooling, 24/7 coverage, and specialized expertise. The question is whether that scale is being deployed in service of the client or in service of the exit.
What to ask
If your current IT provider has been acquired, or if you’re evaluating providers, ask the practical questions:
- Who will actually answer the phone and know your environment six months from now?
- Where are your technicians located? Are they part of the Calgary community?
- How much decision-making authority remains in Calgary?
- What happens to the senior people who currently support you?
- Is the ownership structure aligned with long-term service quality, or with a 4–7 year hold-and-exit timeline?
Private equity is doing what private equity does. It is rational capital seeking returns in a fragmented industry with predictable recurring revenue. That does not mean every Calgary business has to accept the resulting service model as inevitable.
There is still room for independent providers who treat IT as a long-term partnership rather than an asset under management. The ones who stay independent usually do so because they believe the work itself, and the relationships that come with it, matter more than the eventual sale multiple.
For businesses that share that view, the choice remains available. And who knows, maybe we start supporting SolidWorks ourselves.