Alexander Solomon has an economical way of explaining the technology business: consider the filing cabinets. In an office where space costs $75 a square foot, rooms devoted to storing paper are making an expensive contribution to the furniture collection. He used that example to explain what his company might notice on a first visit. Before discussing the next system, look at what the existing arrangements are costing.
It is a useful introduction to Solomon, co-founder and co-CEO of Net at Work. The business he started with his brother Edward in 1996 has grown from IT and network support into a collection of technology practices. His recurring interest is what all that expertise allows a customer to accomplish. Software can supply an impressive vocabulary. A room full of filing cabinets supplies a rather better opening question.
A business degree, then the network
Solomon came to the field through business school. At New York University’s Stern School of Business, he was an Alumni Scholar; his degree was in management and international marketing. In 1996, with Y2K approaching and internet businesses attracting attention, he saw an opportunity among the technically talented people he knew. Customers needed someone who could explain the work in terms they understood.
He spent six months learning about the industry. Being a founder without a technical background brought its own difficulty: earning the confidence of technical employees. Training and results helped him make his case. The gap he had noticed was a commercial opening, but it also suggested a particular kind of company, one in which understanding the owner’s business belonged alongside understanding the equipment.
That distinction gives the beginning of his career its interest. A graduate looks at a field full of specialists and notices the conversation with the customer. Thirty years later, the company’s services have become more elaborate. The original concern remains easy to recognize: expertise has to reach the person paying for it in a form that person can use.
The filing cabinet is paying rent
There are less picturesque examples than office storage. Etronics, an electronics retailer, needed help when success on the web began complicating its operations. Accounting and inventory processes needed attention. Credit-card authorizations had to move faster, while the business wanted to maintain same-day shipping as volume increased. Growth was producing more work than the existing arrangements could comfortably handle.
“Our job is to make Etronics’ job easier.”
Alexander Solomon
The sentence is almost stubbornly plain. It also provides a fair test for a technology advisor. The implementation involved accounting software and connected retail processes; the desired result was a business better able to cope with orders. A customer can appreciate the difference without becoming a software specialist. In fact, avoiding that extra occupation is part of the appeal.
Another customer’s experience brings the idea down to the size of a label. All Seasonings Ingredients worked with Net at Work and ScanForce on warehouse operations. Its case study describes a printing problem that had previously consumed weeks of developers’ time without a resolution. After the switch, a short phone call and some emails got labels printing from scan guns and computers to three printers.
The customer’s delight concerned a barcode and a number on a three-by-two-inch sticker. That is a refreshingly specific unit of progress. Solomon described the work in terms of eliminating manual tasks for customers using legacy ERP systems. The label gives that claim a physical object: something an employee can print, attach and use during the working day.
Conceptual illustration of the advisory approach, not a measurement of client results.
A portfolio with room for other people
The companies around Solomon reflect several of those connected tasks. His official biography lists Docutrend Imaging Solutions, which provides office equipment and print management; Cloud at Work, a hosting provider; Pixafy, an ecommerce agency focused on ERP integration; and Swype Payments. These are neighboring pieces of a business’s working life, from documents to the online sale and the money that follows.
In 2021, FortisPay acquired Swype at Work. Solomon described the connection as a way to combine payment experience with ERP and ecommerce expertise. The detail matters because payment processing occupies a junction: the customer has bought something, but the information still has to travel through the business. An attractive storefront is only part of that journey.
His expansion strategy also leaves space for firms outside the company. The Partner Alliance Program allows specialist businesses to draw on Net at Work’s broader services. A firm that knows a customer’s accounting system may need help with another application. A managed services provider may have infrastructure covered while needing business software expertise. A relationship can expand without every skill being hired into the same office.
By 2022, the breadth extended across three cloud ERP lines: Acumatica, NetSuite and Sage Intacct. Hosting could cover both an application and the infrastructure supporting it. Solomon described an ongoing role in planning the customer’s technology as well as implementing and supporting it. The work stretches beyond the moment a new system is switched on.
“We are able to approach prospects without leading with any one product.”
Alexander Solomon, 2024
Choice creates a responsibility of its own. An advisor with several products has to understand which one fits the business in front of them. Solomon has argued that different products serve different customers and industries. For a buyer, the useful part of that proposition is straightforward: the conversation can begin with the job that needs doing.
The money changes; the question stays
On September 19, 2023, Net at Work announced a growth investment from Lovell Minnick Partners. The financial terms were not disclosed. The announcement identified acquisitions and investment in the business as uses for the capital. Solomon also connected the investment to broader career options for employees and talent in the market. A financing announcement contains people’s working futures as well as a transaction.
For a company founded in 1996, this was a new participant arriving well into the story. Lovell Minnick’s portfolio description places Net at Work across accounting and ERP, customer relationships, HR, managed IT and cloud services. The range helps explain why expansion requires more than adding another product to a price list. Each capability needs people who can deliver it.
The ambition was becoming more explicit. In 2023, Solomon talked about buying larger software resellers and described wanting a position in the midmarket comparable to Deloitte’s in enterprise. That is an aspiration, rather than a description of an accomplished equivalence. Its significance is the scale of the role he wanted Net at Work to play: a continuing advisor with more than one narrow assignment.
A kingdom, an alliance, and a brother
Solomon’s career has an unusually direct starting line. In his 2021 personal questionnaire, he listed co-founding Net at Work as his first full-time job. The same entry records that he was born in Ukraine in 1973. His company has occupied most of his adult working life; its history and his professional history largely begin together.
The questionnaire also asks about recent television viewing. Alex chose The Last Kingdom. Edward chose a rewatch of Game of Thrones. Two brothers running a technology company apparently found room for two different sets of disputed kingdoms. It is a pleasant detail precisely because it carries no useful claim about management ability. Sometimes a television preference can simply be a television preference.
Edward remains his co-founder and fellow co-CEO. The partnership has lasted through the company’s expansion into applications, related businesses and acquisitions. Looking at their archival photograph, the shared enterprise has a literal shape: two brothers standing beside the company name. The range of work behind that name has changed considerably since their original network-support offering.
Thirty years, and another new tool
By January 2026, Net at Work was announcing the acquisition of BHE Consulting, a Boston-based ERP business. Solomon emphasized that the companies had known each other for a long time and shared an approach to clients and employees. In March, he and Adam Kerrigan were listed for an IAMCP discussion of the OnPar Technologies transaction, including the buyer’s strategy and approach to integration.
Acquisitions bring the promise of additional skills. They also bring the work of combining organizations that already have customers and ways of operating. Those announcements show the present-day demands on a founder whose company began three decades earlier. Buying expertise supplies the beginning of the next assignment; people still have to make that expertise useful together.
In August, Solomon joined Accounting Today’s Rethinking reselling conversation as Net at Work marked its 30th year. The discussion covered a market changing through acquisitions and AI, with customers expecting continuing advice. He returned to a familiar problem: several technology suppliers can leave a business owner caught between them when something needs fixing.
His writing for managed services partners carries that concern forward. He describes investment in AI as part of solving business problems, alongside applications, data and infrastructure. He also leaves room for partners to remain independent while using the company’s capabilities. The proposed relationship is judged by what it lets the partner deliver for a customer.
That is where the filing cabinets belong in the larger story. They remind us that a technology decision begins somewhere concrete, in the cost of space or the movement of an order or a label that will finally print. Alexander Solomon has spent his career asking to be involved in those decisions. The software keeps changing. The business owner still needs someone to call.