Consilien Ranked #123 on CRN's 2026 Fast Growth 150 List

CRN ranked Consilien No. 123 on its 2026 Fast Growth 150, the annual list of the fastest-growing technology solution providers in North America. Our two-year growth rate was 35.20%. The list published August 5, 2026.

That's the announcement. The number by itself doesn't tell you much.

A growth rate is a result. It gets produced by decisions made 18 to 24 months earlier, by what clients asked for and what we chose to build in response. Over those two years the requests coming into our managed IT and advisory practice moved in one specific direction, and that shift is worth more of your time than the ranking is.

What CRN actually measured

The Fast Growth 150 ranks solution providers with at least $1 million in gross annual sales by their two-year growth rate. Systems integrators, value-added resellers, managed service providers, IT consultants. It's revenue math, not a judged award. Nobody voted. The rankings come from submitted financials, which is the part worth knowing before you weigh any list like this.

Jennifer Follett, VP of U.S. Content and Executive Editor at CRN, described this year's group as companies "leveraging deep technical expertise and bold, future-focused strategies to accelerate their momentum in an increasingly dynamic IT landscape." Across the full 2026 list, the growth clusters around three demand areas. AI, security, and cloud.

Growth came from data architecture, not dashboards

The biggest change in what clients asked for was access to their own operational and financial data.

Not reporting tools. Not another BI license. The actual problem in a 200-person manufacturer is that production data sits in one system, financials in another, and customer history in a third, with no reliable way to join them. Leadership asks a question on Monday. Somebody spends four days in spreadsheets. The answer lands after the decision has already been made.

So we built out data analytics and data architecture services. That means data lakes and data warehousing, which are centralized places to hold information pulled from several systems in a structure you can actually query. Unglamorous work. It's also what makes everything downstream possible.

Gartner has put a number on the cost of skipping it. Through 2026, organizations will abandon 60% of AI projects that aren't supported by AI-ready data, and 63% of organizations either lack the data management practices AI requires or don't know whether they have them.

AI won't fix an undefined workflow

In our submission to CRN we named the biggest emerging challenge as the gap between AI demand and AI clarity. Companies want to implement AI. Far fewer have defined what business problem it should solve, or what output they expect back.

AI is an intelligence layer that sits on top of structured automation and governed data. When the workflow underneath it is undefined, AI doesn't repair the workflow. It runs the confusion faster.

A Netrio survey of mid-market organizations found that 82% already have AI running somewhere in production while only 26% call it scaled and governed across the business. The distance between "we're using it" and "we control it" is where the wasted spend lives.

Our sequence runs use case definition, then workflow design, then data readiness, then tool selection. Tool selection comes last. It's almost always where companies want to start.

Compliance became its own practice

Compliance advisory grew for a different reason. Regulatory pressure is now reaching companies that don't contract directly with anyone who regulates them.

A 60-person metal finishing shop supplying an aerospace prime inherits CMMC obligations through flow-down clauses written into its purchase orders. CMMC is the Department of Defense's cybersecurity certification program, and that shop never signed anything with the DoD. The requirement arrives through the customer anyway, usually with a deadline attached.

We expanded the compliance readiness team to meet that. Worth being precise about the structure, though. Compliance at Consilien is a separate engagement, not something folded into a managed IT contract. Bundling makes the scope vague and the evidence thin, and an assessor reads evidence, not intentions.

The part the ranking doesn't show

Consilien has been independently owned since 2001. The growth CRN measured is organic, which means it came from existing clients expanding scope and from new clients signing, not from acquiring another provider's book of business.

That's less common than it used to be. M&A Signal counted 466 MSP transactions across North America in 2025, up 20% year over year, with private equity involved in 72% of them, either as the direct buyer or as the backer of a platform roll-up.

Neither model is automatically better. They produce different companies. When your provider gets acquired mid-contract, your account team, your escalation path, and your roadmap can all change without anyone asking you first.

Reading a growth ranking if you're choosing an IT partner

Growth rankings measure revenue. They don't measure whether a provider is good at the specific thing you need, and a provider outrunning its own delivery capacity is a real risk rather than a hypothetical one.

Two questions get you further than a list position. What did this provider build over the past two years, and what made them build it? And what happens to your account when they grow another 35%?