Pittsburgh, PA-based electrical supplies distributor Wesco entered into an agreement to acquire Ascent LLC for $185 million.

The news comes a day after Wesco reported its 3Q24 financial results.

Arlington, VA-based Ascent specializes in data center facility and property management services, reporting $115 million in trailing 12-month sales. The company offers solutions for data center operations, including AI-driven design, liquid cooling implementation, facility maintenance, critical repairs and emergency services.

MDM Podcast: The Keys to Wesco’s Digital Initiatives (August)

“This services-based acquisition strengthens our leading data center solutions portfolio for our customers,” Wesco Chairman, President and CEO John Engel said in an Oct. 31 news release. “In addition to site operations, Ascent’s engineering expertise and professional services further enhance our solutions that span the entire lifecycle of the data center.”

Ascent’s proprietary Navigator platform provides an integrated dashboard for managing critical data center infrastructure. The company operates in the U.S. and Canada with more than 330 employees.

The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter.

In early June, Wesco acquired data center and building intelligence software entroCIM for $30 million.

Wesco’s 3Q financials showed sales of $5.5 billion, down 2.7% year-over-year, and organic sales down 0.6%. The company said most of the sales decline was driven by its 1Q sale of the company’s Wesco Integrated Supply business unit for $350 million to Valle Distribution.

MDM’s Wesco Case Study

This Summer, we took a deep dive on Wesco to produce an MDM Case Study on the distributor. Premium members can download it here, while non-members can find it here in the MDM Store.

We prefaced that case study with a three-part Premium article series:

• Wesco Analysis, Pt. 1: Scale and Value Proposition
• Wesco Analysis, Pt. 2: Enterprise Strategies
• Wesco Analysis, Pt. 3: Digitize the Business

And to decompress that series and case study, we had an MDM Podcast with the series’ author, John Gunderson