The most revealing thing Solutions II ever bought may be the company it later gave back. Years before the Colorado IT provider pushed into cybersecurity and the Southeast, it acquired a Vancouver solution provider called Blue World. The combination failed. CEO W. Todd Bowling later gave the trade press a clean postmortem: the cultures did not mix, so Solutions II unwound the deal. In a sector fluent in seamless-integration press releases, that small confession is unusually useful.
It explains the company that Solutions II has become. This is a privately held enterprise technology provider founded in 1992, headquartered in Littleton, Colorado, and built for organizations whose old systems cannot simply be tossed into a dumpster labeled “digital transformation.” Its engineers work across cloud and on-premises infrastructure, cybersecurity, data protection, managed operations and maintenance. The customer list skews toward places where an outage becomes a real-world event: 911 dispatch centers, police agencies, hospitals and casino floors.
Solutions II is not selling a single magic box. It sells the assessment, the architecture, the partner technology, the implementation and, often, the people who watch the environment after everyone else has gone home. The business sits between a national integrator, a managed service provider, a security consultancy and a value-added reseller. That mixture can sound like a catalog. Its central idea makes it coherent.
The room disappeared. The responsibility did not.
Solutions II calls its organizing method the Adaptable Data Center. The phrase arrived through its 2019 acquisition of Chouinard & Myhre, a Northern California data-center specialist. In plain English, the framework asks buyers to stop defining a data center by its walls and start defining it by the capabilities the business needs: applications available, data protected, identities controlled, recovery rehearsed and costs understood. Those capabilities may live in a company facility, several clouds, an edge location or all three.
This sounds obvious until a migration goes wrong. Moving a badly inventoried estate to the cloud does not remove technical debt; it gives the debt a monthly meter. Buying another security tool does not help if nobody knows which devices it misses. Adding AI to a messy data environment makes the mess faster. Solutions II tries to join those decisions before a product order turns into a strategy.
The services beneath that map are concrete. Managed data-center teams administer storage, compute and virtualization across VMware, AIX, Windows, IBM i and Linux. The backup practice designs immutable copies, replication and disaster recovery. Security work covers risk and compliance assessments, penetration testing, incident response, virtual CISO advice and around-the-clock monitoring. Cloud consultants design and operate mixed environments rather than demanding an all-or-nothing migration.
Then there is ASM Illuminate, launched in 2023. It aggregates asset information from multiple tools and networks, scans for vulnerabilities and missing controls, and produces a prioritized action plan. The useful part is correlation. Most large companies already own scanners, endpoint agents and inventories. The problem is the gaps between them - the forgotten server, the unmanaged laptop, the cloud workload that belongs to everyone and therefore nobody. Solutions II says the service can centralize device information in as little as four hours. That is a service claim, not a universal stopwatch, but it identifies the correct first question: what do you actually have?
Security became the growth engine
The strategic turn began before ransomware became a boardroom word. In 2015, Solutions II acquired South Seas, a security-focused provider. Four years later, Bowling said the former South Seas business represented about 30 percent of total revenue, while security overall had moved above 30 percent. The acquisition changed the mix because the capability answered a need already present in infrastructure accounts: customers could not modernize systems while treating security as a final coat of paint.
The company institutionalized that view as “Security in Everything.” The slogan is tidy; the work is not. A public-safety deployment may combine dispatch, records, evidence, mapping, mobile access and multiple agencies. A casino mixes lodging, loyalty, finance, gaming and regulatory obligations. A hospital has clinical systems, protected health information and little patience for an elegant maintenance window. Solutions II says it has implemented 911 centers supporting more than 1,000 public-safety entities, built more than 150 highly available centers, and serves more than a quarter of U.S. casinos.
Those markets reveal who should care. Solutions II is designed for a CIO with a mixed estate, a thin specialist bench and consequences for downtime. The buyer is not merely shopping for software. The buyer needs somebody to architect around Dell, IBM, Microsoft, Veeam, VMware, Cisco, Nutanix, Red Hat and the awkward equipment nobody mentioned during the sales demo. More than 50 partner relationships let Solutions II assemble those pieces. The company says it will recommend another expert when work falls outside its proven skills.
That willingness to say no is part positioning, part risk control. Solutions II guarantees its work when the client accepts its design and partners with it for sourcing and implementation. The conditions matter. A guarantee is easier to honor when one team owns the architecture and knows which compromises entered the room. Buyers who split design, procurement and implementation among three firms should not expect a fourth firm to guarantee the result.
What it costs - and what can fail first
There is no public menu price. Engagements begin with an assessment, workshop or proposal; cost depends on platforms, estate size, coverage hours, compliance needs and how much operational responsibility the client transfers. Solutions II publishes potential economics instead of dollar packages. It says mixed OEM and third-party maintenance can lower support costs by 40 to 60 percent, while modern backup can lower total cost by 30 to 50 percent and cut administration time by as much as 90 percent. Those are directional vendor claims. The honest purchasing move is to demand a baseline, a migration cost and a measurement window.
What fails first is usually less cinematic than the breach. It is inventory. An unknown asset cannot be patched or protected. Next comes ownership: alerts arrive, but nobody has authority to act. Recovery fails later, often because a backup existed but a restore had not been practiced. Solutions II's portfolio follows that sequence - discover, assess, prioritize, monitor, respond and recover - and its managed model supplies people where the client's org chart has blank space.
The harder failure is cultural. Blue World taught Solutions II that compatible services do not create a compatible company. The next deals were described in different terms. CMI had worked with Solutions II for roughly a decade before the 2019 acquisition; the two CEOs began serious combination talks among trusted channel partners. In 2025, Solutions II bought Atlanta-based Vertical VAR after emphasizing shared client advocacy, technical standards and a people-first approach. Vertical VAR added IBM-centered industry relationships and Southeast reach. It also gave the supplied Atlanta contact record a logical home while corporate headquarters stayed in Colorado.
Solutions II starts in Colorado, serving enterprise technology customers.
The acquired practice later grows to roughly 30 percent of company revenue.
The Adaptable Data Center becomes the connective tissue across services.
Asset visibility becomes a named managed-security service.
The company expands in Atlanta and deepens vertical IBM expertise.
The playbook worth stealing
A reader can copy the method without copying the vendor. First, write down the business capability that cannot fail. “Move to cloud” is not an outcome; “restore dispatch in 30 minutes” is. Second, reconcile every asset source until the exceptions have owners. Third, rank vulnerabilities by business impact, not by the emotional color of a dashboard. Fourth, design recovery before migration. Fifth, rehearse the outage with the people who must make decisions. Solutions II applies the same practice internally through weekly role-play and testing.
The talent system is another clue. The company reports more than 400 certifications, an average tenure of 11 years and 30 percent of employees staying longer than a decade. Its paid sabbatical is unusually concrete: four weeks for every five years of service. Great Place to Work listed 57 U.S.-based employees in August 2025 and reported unanimous positive workplace sentiment among surveyed staff; LinkedIn places the business in the broader 51-to-200 range. Whatever the exact post-acquisition headcount, this is a specialist company trying to retain expertise, not a labor marketplace trying to make people interchangeable.
When this model works
- Mixed legacy, cloud and edge systems
- Downtime carries operational or safety cost
- Internal teams lack niche coverage
- The buyer can assign owners and share telemetry
When it does not
- You want a self-serve commodity tool
- A public fixed price is mandatory
- No one will change process or practice recovery
- Procurement fragments accountability by design
The model is not universal. A small cloud-native company with one platform and strong internal operators may find the integration layer excessive. A buyer seeking the cheapest help desk or an instant online price will be frustrated. Nor can managed services fix a client that withholds access, rejects remediation and refuses to rehearse. Outsourcing labor is possible; outsourcing ownership is not.
Where Solutions II fits now
Solutions II competes with national integrators such as CDW, SHI, Presidio, World Wide Technology and Insight; with security specialists such as Optiv; with regional resellers; and with the option of hiring more internal staff. It lacks the procurement scale of the largest players and the product simplicity of a pure software company. Its advantage is narrower: long experience across unfashionably mixed environments, industry context in public safety and gaming, and a service model that can stay after installation.
The company's recent AI-readiness language should be read through that lens. In November 2025 it hired Microsoft veteran Gilbert Teniente to expand work around Azure, Microsoft 365, endpoint management, security and emerging AI programs. Solutions II is not positioning itself as a frontier-model laboratory. It is selling the plumbing that determines whether AI can reach governed data without opening an exciting new door for attackers. That is less dazzling and probably more useful.
After 33 years, the best summary is not “hybrid data center, cyber security, managed services,” though all three are accurate. Solutions II is in the accountability business. It makes money when a customer would rather have one experienced team connect the tools, watch the system and answer when something breaks. Its history adds the important qualifier: know when to say no, because the wrong yes can take years to unwind.