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Born Out of Acxiom, Ensono Aims to Expand in Mainframe Market

2 min read

Jeff VonDeylen, chief executive officer of Ensono, said the $200 million Chicago-based business born out of Acxom IT last year is focusing on innovation but finding it difficult to recruit young people with the mainframe skills it needs.

The company is also planning to move from the Acxiom campus in Conway to another location in the city by the first half of next year.

Ensono used to be Acxiom IT, the information technology management division of Acxiom Corp. of Little Rock, before Boston investors Charlesbank Capital Partners and M/C Partners purchased it for $190 million.

VonDeylen said Acxiom is still a 5 percent owner and represented on Ensono’s board. He spoke Thursday during the Conway Area Chamber of Commerce’s monthly CEO luncheon at Central Baptist College.

He also said Ensono is spending $10 million over the next 18 months on innovation in server and cloud services and hiring people so the company can help its clients grow. 

“That’s the area that, frankly, our clients and prospects and folks that left the business said we need to really improve on. [They’ve said] it’s great that you’re providing a great service today for what I do, but I need you to think about the future,” VonDeylen said.

He said Ensono provides mainframe, server and cloud services for less than 50 clients. But the company would like to have more than 100 clients and be a $300 million business in the next three years. Ensono seeks as clients established businesses running legacy applications that have annual revenue of $100 million to $10 billion.

Ensono has 700 employees, and 100 are at its Conway data center, VonDeylen said. The company also has data centers in Little Rock; Downers Grove, Illinois; Elk Grove Village, Illinois; and Leeds in the United Kingdom. It has delivery centers in Illinois, Arkansas, Poland, India and the U.K.

VonDeylen said Acxiom wasn’t spending a lot on marketing and sales before the investors bought the unit, but that the new company is investing in those areas.

VonDeylen said Ensono has a great team and does well with customer experience. “We’re only as good as our customers say,” he said. 

VonDeylen also said a large part of Ensono’s business is mainframe management. With the exception of two IT giants, Ensono is one of the top five mainframe service providers, he said.

Although the use of mainframes isn’t growing, more companies are outsourcing that function, he said. In all, Ensono manages 61,000 mainframes, 15,000 client servers, 10 petabytes of storage and more than 14,000 databases. The average tenure of its employees is 14 years.

VonDeylen said Ensonso is in a $50 billion-plus market at just the right time; it’s projected to grow more than 10 percent by 2020.

He also said the company has added nine developers to its Conway team and three interns from the University of Central Arkansas will be working there this summer.

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