Last week, Canadian company Volaris Group announced it had acquired Aleyant, a Chicago-based provider of print automation software, including web-to-print, MIS, and other workflow components. The surprise in this announcement for industry watchers was not so much that Aleyant was acquired; Greg Salzman and his team have done a great job building the company and its customer base, but many smaller software companies reach a place where they need additional resources to continue to grow. The surprise was who acquired them. So far, I haven’t spoken to anyone in the industry that was familiar with the Volaris Group. That’s most likely because this was their first entrée into the printing industry. So let’s start with who they are.

According to David Nyland, Portfolio Leader and President, Communications & Media vertical at Volaris, “Volaris is part of Constellation Software, a $2.5 billion company with a $20 billion market cap. We are a software company, first and foremost, and we invest in software specific to vertical markets. About 40 to 50 verticals worldwide make up our portfolio, and we enter new verticals all the time.”

Nyland is responsible for Communications & Media vertical, and all of the portfolio companies in that vertical, where Aleyant is now residing. Nyland states that the company never sells the businesses it acquires, adding, “We manage them forever. We find a business as a starting point for entering a new vertical, and we use the knowledge we acquire to understand that new vertical better. We then plot out a course to continue developing our portfolio in that area.”