XTIUM rose to the No. 9 spot in the 2025 MSP 501 through the merger of ATSG (No. 229 in 2024) and Evolve IP, followed by a rebranding. And the acquisitions will likely continue. XTIUM CEO Russ Reeder said his goal is to grow both through M&A and organically, perhaps becoming a portfolio MSP similar to New Charter, Evergreen, Blue Alliance and The 20 MSP.
XTIUM has spent much of the past year integrating two large MSPs under a new brand. Reeder joined ATSG before the Evolve IP deal to raise capital, conduct due diligence and oversee the acquisition. He said the rebranding was done to avoid confusion. ATSG and Evolve IP both previously acquired MSPs, and there is an aircraft leasing company called ATSG (Air Transport Services Group). He felt it was time to bring his behemoth MSP with around 500 employees and $200 million in revenue under one brand.
“All these MSPs have grown through acquisitions, and we had different divisions that were still using old email addresses from different brands,” he said. “And we were bringing two $100 million-plus businesses together. We wanted to give everyone one flag to carry.
“The whole idea was to bring the two companies together and do what most other MSPs aren't doing, and that's really fully integrating to have a unified team delivering unified services and implementing all new ERP systems.”
XTIUM further expanded without acquisition in June, opening an EMEA headquarters in Rotterdam, Netherlands with more than 30 employees and around 100 customers in the region. Reeder said the plan is also to scale through further acquisitions.
“What we're looking to do is to continue to grow through acquisition, but also focus on organic growth,” he said. “Now we have a broader portfolio to go to our customers to enable them to have additional cloud offerings and virtual desktops and managed network services and cybersecurity and AI advisory services as well.”
XTIUM lists enterprise customers as its primary focus. ATSG was a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Managed Network Services and XTIUM is also strong the desktop-as-a-service market around Citrix and VMware virtualization. Reeder said XTIUM has increased recurring managed services over the past year and is developing its AI offerings even if they have not been major revenue producers yet.
AI Advisory Services for Handling Complexity
“Don’t let anyone tell you they’re selling it like crazy,” he said of AI. “We are talking to clients out there, and we have an AI advisory service. What it comes down to is, these customers still don’t have clean data. There’s a huge misconception that AI is easy to implement. Just because it’s easy to go to a web browser or an app and ask AI a question and have it give you a mostly correct answer, that’s different than an ERP implementation. And it’s as complicated as rolling out a CRM system or a financial system because you have to focus on the outcomes. You have to prioritize, get the business outcome you want to solve, and go back to where the data is clean. It’s a complex implementation to get real business value.”
Russ Reeder
XTIUM has about a dozen AI agents it uses internally before rolling out to customers. These include a sales coach trained on speech recognition, a customer service training agent, and agents for quality assurance and help desk ticket hydration.
Reeder has the ideal background for a portfolio MSP. He started as an engineer, but has also been CEO or president of Netrix, Infrascale, OVH Cloud (US), icitizen, MediaTemple (sold to GoDaddy), NXTV, and Rightsline. He’s been a founder, bought and sold companies, and was a sales exec for Oracle and other companies. That combination of techie and entrepreneurship provides great value to an MSP leader these days.
“Being an old programmer, I love to dive into the tech and work with products and figure out how the customers are using it, what's our unique competitive advantage,” Reeder said. “So I've done about six different companies. I sold one cloud company to GoDaddy, and I was on the executive team to help take GoDaddy public in 2012. When I was running Media Temple, we really created the first cloud service provider for AWS.”
Macro Market Challenges Remain
While he anticipates AI will eventually drive revenue and expects to continue to grow organically and through acquisition, Reeder said he senses a reluctance among customers to spend now. Actually, maybe more than a reluctance.
“We were much more bullish on the economy last year than we are right now,” Reeder said. “In times of concern, customers pull back. People aren't as confident that they know exactly what's going to happen with tariffs and such in the future. The buying cycle has slowed down. We've seen, I think there's a lot of fear, actually on the AI side. It shouldn’t be fear, it should just be proper concern for implementing correct technology. Just like a financial system, just like a CRM system, it's complex, right? Ttis is why you don't build your own financial system and implement your own financial system. You bring in experts to help. So I think we're going to see a lot more of that.”