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Apptis Holdings

Apptis Holdings

Apptis Holdings (“Apptis”) was a rapidly growing, privately held company in the federal information technology services sector. Apptis provided end-to-end enterprise solutions (both products and services) to a wide range of federal government agencies, with low perceived risk of budgetary cutbacks, particularly in the areas of network engineering and convergence, software engineering and development, storage management, managed IT solutions, security consulting, enterprise support services and technology deployment services.

Through top down analysis, New Mountain proactively identified the federal services industry as a large, growing and economically defensive industry, beginning in the year 2000. In October 2003, Apptis’ owner-managers selected New Mountain as their chosen partner without an auction, due to management’s desire to maintain a very significant minority ownership position in Apptis and to find the best “value added” private equity partner to then help build Apptis further.

During the investment, New Mountain actively supported the management team in their execution of an accelerated growth strategy. This strategy culminated in the completion of four key acquisitions and a continued focus on organic growth. Financial systems and technological capabilities were upgraded, and key new executives and board members have been added to the Apptis team. The company also streamlined its operations into two units: a services unit called Apptis Services (which comprised the majority of the earnings) and a products unit called Iron Bow.

The Apptis Services unit was sold in June 2011 to a strategic acquiror URS Corporation at an attractive valuation, at which time the Iron Bow products unit was spun out as a stand-alone company. Many of the key technology initiatives cited by URS Corporation in its press release announcing its acquisition of Apptis Services (such as Apptis’ pioneering work in cloud computing for the federal government) were initiated at the company during New Mountain’s period of ownership. Subsequently in September 2011, New Mountain and other shareholders sold the majority of their position in Iron Bow in a management buyout.