Technology consulting company Trace3 LLC in Irvine has put together cybersecurity, cloud computing and analytics into a streamlined offering, pulling in about $2.5 billion a year, as customers’ business needs get more complex.
This year’s projected revenue is a huge boost from the $2 billion posted two years ago in 2021.
“We’re very happy operating as a large private company,” CEO Rich Fennessy told the Business Journal on June 2. “We continue to expand into new markets.”
He added: “We’ll continue to grow the size of team Trace3.
“Last year, 2022, was a record year for Trace3 in terms of growth and expansion,” according to Fennessy, whose company ranks No. 15 on this week’s Business Journal list of largest private companies based in Orange County (see list, page 31).
Trace3 is also one of Orange County’s largest privately held technology companies. It’s owned by private equity firm American Securities LLC of New York, which paid an undisclosed amount for the firm in 2021.
Trace3’s mix of end-to-end technology services and products range from artificial intelligence and data science to cloud computing and security consulting.
The company now has more than 1,300 employees, up from approximately 1,210 last year, with about 150 of them in Irvine.
The company had posted two dozen open positions on its website as of June 5, including senior cloud security architect, data center engineer and senior sales director.
Client Evolution
The company’s client list is also expanding, and now tops 3,500.
Trace3 calls itself a “technology consultancy that provides IT strategy, solutions, and services to the world’s most admired companies.”
Two-thirds of the clients are large enterprise top-ranked Fortune 1000 companies, while one-third are higher-end mid-market.
“We’ve done a nice job of evolving the business over the last several years as the market has changed and as our client needs have changed,” according to Fennessy.
While the company declines to release specific client names, the Detroit Lions last year said Trace3 had become the team’s official analytics partner.
“Sports franchises are increasingly relying on analytics to drive real-time decisions,” the NFL franchise said in September.
Trace3 has clients in 49 of the 50 states. California, Colorado and Michigan have the largest concentration of them.
Cybersecurity, Networking
CEO Fennessy said cybersecurity and the networking business together is the company’s fastest-growing segment and will provide about $1 billion of this year’s total revenue.
The company acquired cybersecurity firm Set Solutions of Houston in March, and showed off its expanded Texas footprint with a series of billboards there as well as in Dallas and Austin.
The acquisition of Set Solutions continues Trace3’s strategic expansion plan. The investment allows the combined companies to deepen cybersecurity capabilities for commercial and enterprise clients.
Trace3’s biggest business sectors are financial services, healthcare and technology.
Fennessy called Trace 3’s cybersecurity capabilities “very extensive.”
The CEO came to Trace3 in September 2019, after having served as CEO of Kudelski Security, a cybersecurity company based in Switzerland and in Phoenix.
“We used to be an infrastructure company, providing the technology that they needed for the data center,” he said of Trace3’s clients. “We still do that but what has evolved over time is a focus on cybersecurity, cloud computing and this whole concept of data analytics.”
Now he sees a convergence of the strategies for cloud computing, cybersecurity and data analytics.
“In today’s world, all of those three strategies are now one strategy. They’re converging,” he says, focusing on the Trace3 offerings.
Integrator, Reseller
Trade magazine CRN ranked Trace3 in a tie for 36th place among the “top integrators, service providers and IT consultants in North America by services revenue” for 2022.
“We don’t have our own software product that we’ve created for the most part. We’re basically a reseller of some of the leading technology partners in the world,” according to Fennessy.
“We wrap our services around those to make them successful inside of our clients’ environments.”
Fennessy said that on the services and consulting side, Trace3 competes with Deloitte, Accenture and PWC.
On the “technology resell” side, Trace3 competes with companies such as World Wide Technology of St. Lous.
Its list of “strategic partners” includes AWS (Amazon Web Services), Cisco, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft and Nvidia.
