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It all started with a chance to encounter in the hallways of the second floor of the Centennial Plaza building, across the street from Sandy (Utah) City Hall. Two companies' executives, one from Telarus (News - Alert), a distributor (master agent) of commercial technology infrastructure, and one from LVM, Inc., creators of VXSuite, a software product used by phone system vendors to troubleshoot and monitor VoIP phone performance, got into a conversation.

Roger Blohm, president of VXSuite, was in the middle of planning his company's first ever partner conference in Las Vegas, which was just a month away. He explained to me, co-founder of Telarus, Inc., that many phone system value added resellers (VARs) were going to be in attendance, and that they were looking for a speaker to address the topic of "why bandwidth matters" -- somewhat of a new topic for many VXSuite partners.

"For me, the decision to volunteer to speak at the event was a simple one," I recalled. "The choices were: either I speak at their convention or they would invite one of our competitors. LVM, Inc. was our literal next-door neighbor and I just couldn't let them invite one of my peers."

In fact, not only were Telarus and LVM, Inc. next door neighbors in Centennial Plaza, both the president of Telarus, Adam Edwards, and Roger participated in the same local CEO networking group called Vistage. 

"I knew Adam well and sat next to him at several Vistage meetings," recalled Blohm. "He seemed like a nice guy running a great company, but our paths never really crossed until Patrick brought him to our first partner conference in Las Vegas. I think that's when the light bulb turned on."

While at the conference, both Adam and I met with the VXSuite development, marketing, and sales team. We also met with many resellers of the VXSuite software. 

Soon, Telarus invited Roger Blohm and Doug Tolley, VP of sales for LVM, to become guest speakers at the Telarus-sponsored nationwide recruiting events called, "Technology Innovation Conference." They covered 21 cities in the second half of 2014 talking to people about why network analytics matter when selling cloud solutions. 

"During our road trips, it all started to make more and more sense.”I said, ‘We sell network connectivity (through our network of 2,200 independent sales partners) and the VXSuite software makes sure it all works like it is supposed to.’ We seemed to fit like a hand in a glove, so Roger and I began to talk about the possibility of an acquisition during a flight from Philadelphia to Boston."

"I thought he was joking," recalled Blohm, "but the more I thought about our companies coming together to create something truly revolutionary, the more it began to make sense for us as well."

"People just hate dropped calls at work," added Doug Tolley, now the SVP of sales for the combined Telarus. "The problem is, none of the service providers will ever own any of the problems. Finger pointing is the name of the game in this business, so now we can be the independent, third-party referee that can help restore good phone service and ensure that it keeps working like it is supposed to. Oh, and by the way, if better bandwidth is needed, Telarus can help with that too. It's crazy we didn't figure this out sooner."

Eight months later, the two companies tied the knot on September 18, 2105. The acquisition will finalize on January 1, 2016.

You can find the "VXSuite enabled Telarus" in the same place where the whole story started; right in Sandy, Utah, across from City Hall at 45 W Sego Lily Drive. Now that the combined companies are one in purpose: To sell and monitor high speed networks that are used for VoIP infrastructure, let's see if they really can change the world.