Cloud growth

Fellow former global telecommunication executives Tony Pompliano and Harry Hobbs recently discovered a quirk in the national IT services marketplace: The industry, for the most part, lacks a mid-market.

There are a few behemoths, such as IBM and Accenture. On the flip side, there are many more small players, from five to 20 employees, that dominate the industry. The latter is especially true on the Gulf Coast.

Pompliano and Hobbs seek to fill that void — with a launch in Sarasota backed by $40 million in venture capital. They started with Sarasota-based Anexio, an IT services firm the duo acquired early last year. That entity is now the firm's network operations center, or NOC, in IT industry lingo. The executives expect to at least double the workforce in Sarasota in 2014, from 15 employees to more than 30.