(Updated with investor list) Anexinet, the 300-person consulting and technology management firm based in Blue Bell, which claims Comcast, Independence Blue Cross/AmeriHealth and SEI among its clients, has named president Joe Lanzisera as the company's new CEO.
Lanzisera succeeds John Connolly, who retired following the firm's recent acquisition of ListenLogic, the $4 million (yearly sales) Conshohocken social-intelligence firm, which mines data from Facebook and other social media for clients including Allstate, Comcast and Pfizer. ListenLogic founder and largest investor Vince Schiavone and secon-largest investor Steve Andriole, a Villanova U professor, declined to comment on the price, citing confidentiality agreements; as did Lanzisera.
ListenLogic's 18 tech staff are moving from that firm's former Conshohocken office to Blue Bell, Lanzisera told me. The sale (presumably for a multiple of several times ListenLogic's $4 million in yearly sales, but Lanzisera won't confirm how much) paid off investors including Schiavone, Andriole, Mid-Atlantic Ventures, state-funded Ben Franklin Technology Partners, and Villanova U CIO Steve Fugale, among others. Not included in the deal was ListenLogic's sister company, Akuda Labs, in San Jose.
ListenLogic attracted Anexinet as it "got more involved with call center data, customer service data and other unstructured data our clients were trying to work with," Lanzisera told me. "We wanted to marry those capabilities with our own analytics offerings."
A former consultant with accounting firms Smart & Associates, Arthur Andersen and Grant Thornton, Lanzisera joined Anexinet in 2012 (he was one of more than half the 145 former Smart consultants who left Grant Thornton after joining the practice in 2011 after Smart was spun off by its private-equity owners and LECG.) California-based Marlin Equity Partners bought a controlling interest in Anexinet in 2014, and it's been expanding since as Marlin seeks to add value to its investment. Founder Diego Calderin retired in 2014.
Anexinet has rolled up a series of Philadelphia-area Internet services firms since the 1990s - Virtus Partners and Sycamore Group, among others. Will the company grow enough to go public? "It's at the extreme of a dream. Not on our radar right now," Lanzisera told me.
Besides its Blue Bell headquarters, Anexinet has a satellite office at 24th and Walnut Sts. in Center City, convenient for young engineers who live in town, according to Lanzisera.