David Henley likes an argument, at least the useful kind. Neil Medwed, who sold his own technology business to Meriplex and joined its leadership, described a chief executive who welcomed strong colleagues and tested their ideas through debate. Even agreement could require a little cross-examination. A meeting with universal nodding would seem to leave something unfinished.
That description offers a way into Henley’s career. He co-founded Meriplex in 2001 and helped turn a Houston voice and internet provider into a national managed technology business. Along the way, the company acquired services, offices, customers, and other founders. Each addition made the organization larger. It also made the original founder’s job less likely to resemble the one he had started with.
By July 2022, Meriplex had completed 13 acquisitions since its 2018 partnership with Clairvest. It had reached 12 offices in eight states. The numbers describe an expansion; the people behind them explain how it happened. Henley’s story runs through his father, his investment partners, and executives who brought businesses of their own into the company.
It is an unusually practical version of entrepreneurial ambition. The work concerns business connections, security, and the people who answer when technology stops cooperating. There is little romance in a support ticket. There is, however, plenty of room to build a business around taking it seriously.
October 2018
An engineer, a father, and a telephone line
Henley graduated from Texas A&M University with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering. His early working life included a short stint at a major telecommunications company before he went into business for himself. His father, Arthur Henley, provided mentorship and industry experience. Arthur was also a co-holder of an early voice-over-IP patent, a family connection with rather more technical substance than a useful address book.
The company they co-founded began with voice and internet services. That starting point matters because it places Henley in the working machinery of business technology: the connections that allow organizations to speak, send information, and keep their locations operating together. Meriplex’s later additions would extend that responsibility further into the customer’s business.
In July 2010, Meriplex announced competitive local exchange carrier status through its telecommunications subsidiary. Henley was then identified as vice president. The new status allowed the company to bring voice, data connectivity, and Cisco solutions together through one provider. Its first associated offering combined SIP voice connectivity with an MPLS network.
The vocabulary was specialist; the sales argument was refreshingly comprehensible. Businesses with multiple locations could reorganize their communications spending and put money toward improvements. Henley’s explanation emphasized control over service quality, productivity, and the customer’s budget. Even at this stage, the ambition was broader than selling a line and sending an invoice.
The customer needed more than a connection
Meriplex gradually took on more of the technology surrounding those connections. Its 2012 acquisition of ITR Technologies added an IT service suite covering endpoint management and a service desk. In 2017, a service-provider partnership with VeloCloud brought software-defined wide-area networking into its communications offering. The company’s scope widened in steps, years before the acquisition count became a headline.
These changes help explain the continuity in Henley’s career. A customer buying connectivity also has computers, applications, and security requirements. Providing more of that surrounding work gives the provider a larger role in keeping the business running. It also raises the standard the provider must meet. A broader promise gives the customer more reasons to call.
The April 2019 purchase of Houston-based I.T. Works added managed services, cloud capabilities, and security expertise. John Powell, its CEO, joined Meriplex as senior vice president of managed services. The transaction brought an operator into a leadership position as well as a portfolio into a sales presentation.
Henley’s stated interest was in combining advanced security capabilities with Meriplex’s networking services. Seen together, the earlier IT acquisition, networking partnership, and I.T. Works deal describe a sustained movement toward responsibility for more of the customer’s technology. The business was growing along the path of the work it already touched.
October 2018 changed the ownership equation
To expand further, Henley brought in outside capital. Meriplex partnered with Clairvest in October 2018, with Henley retaining a significant ownership stake. The announcement tied the partnership to a faster service roadmap and improvements in the customer experience. He remained an owner while making room for a financial partner.
When the investment relationship began, Meriplex was a regional business with US$25 million in revenue and 75 employees. In 2022, its workforce reached 303. That change gives some substance to the phrase company growth. More colleagues meant more technical capacity, more coordination, and a larger organization for Henley and his leadership team to manage.
There was also a deliberate addition of experience at board level. In 2020, Richard Jalkut, the former CEO of TPx Communications, joined the Meriplex board. Henley welcomed the chance to work with an executive whose career included running large telecommunications operations. The founder was adding people who had already encountered problems that arrive with scale.
Outside investment and experienced directors are familiar features of business expansion. In Henley’s case, they belong to the personal story because they changed who helped make the decisions. A company can keep its founder and still become a different kind of organization. That requires the founder to share more than a conference table.
Buying a business also meant meeting its people
In August 2020, Meriplex acquired Dallas-based Preferred Technology Solutions. Henley pointed to its physical security capabilities and location as reasons for the deal. Its former CEO, Neil Medwed, joined as director of strategic partnerships. Geographic expansion and a new service capability arrived with a founder who knew his own market.
The pattern is worth pausing over. Customers and technical skills can appear neatly in an acquisition summary. Relationships are harder to transfer by announcement. Keeping executives involved gives those relationships a human point of continuity. Powell and Medwed are concrete examples of acquired-company leaders taking roles inside Meriplex.
The August 2022 acquisition of Southern California’s CPI Solutions brought another combination: regional reach, systems automation expertise, and experience serving automotive businesses. Henley’s explanation singled out those capabilities. California was a place to expand, and CPI supplied particular skills to take there.
In May 2023, Meriplex announced the asset acquisition of Pennsylvania-based Systems Solution, Inc. Henley again emphasized the people supporting customers and the importance of relationships. The East Coast business added another regional base to the national ambition. Across these deals, the recurring question was what the incoming company could contribute beyond its position on a map.
There is a small corrective here to the image of the founder who builds everything personally. Much of Henley’s later work involved choosing what other people had built and giving it a place in a larger operation. Acquisitions put that judgment to a test that lasts well beyond the congratulatory photographs.
Thirteen deals, then another partner
On July 18, 2022, Vitruvian Partners acquired a majority interest in Meriplex. Clairvest retained an investment, and Henley continued to lead the business at the time of the transaction. The ownership changed again without ending his operating role. A second investment partnership would support the next phase of expansion.
Clairvest described a business that had reached 12 offices across eight states through 13 acquisitions since the partnership began. Those measures capture a specific point in the journey. They should be read as a record of what had been assembled by July 2022, rather than a claim about the company’s present footprint.
The people count tells a related story. Over the investment period through the July 2022 recapitalization, the workforce grew from 75 employees to 500. Increasing headcount at that pace changes the distance between a founder and the work being done. More decisions must travel through other leaders. Delegation becomes part of how the organization operates.
Henley addressed that issue in 2022 when reflecting on the demands of expansion. “Rapid growth demands ongoing enhancement of leadership,” he wrote. His advice was to hire leaders familiar with the scale the company intended to reach and give them authority to make changes. It is a fairly demanding instruction for someone accustomed to being the person with the answer.
“Rapid growth demands ongoing enhancement of leadership.”David Henley / 2022
A founder’s job can change again
One marker of Henley’s standing came in 2019, when The Software Report included him in its Top 50 Tech Services CEOs list. The more revealing detail of his career, though, is the succession of changes in the work: communications, managed IT, security, acquisitions, and leadership across a wider organization.
By 2026, Meriplex had announced Jay Katzen as CEO and chairman. Henley’s current organizational listing identifies him as founder and executive board member. The distinction matters. The company he co-founded continues, while the chief executive role belongs to someone else. His place in its history and his present title are separate facts.
The company now describes its model in terms of national resources and local support. That pairing reflects the problem Henley spent years addressing: how to bring more capabilities to customers without making their relationship with the provider feel remote. Buying offices can extend a footprint. Keeping service personal remains an operating task.
Look back across the career and the repeated decision is to bring someone else into the work: a father with technical experience, an investment partner, a director, an acquired founder, a leader hired for the next stage. The argument in the meeting room belongs in that picture. If colleagues can question the founder, the company has more than one person checking its direction. After years of making Meriplex bigger, Henley’s most useful advice may be the instruction to give those people room to act.