Integris lands Fast Company and Inc. 5000 honours for fifth year running
Integris, a New Jersey-headquartered managed IT and AI services provider, has secured back-to-back recognition from two prominent US business rankings. The company was named to Fast Company's Eighth Annual Best Workplaces for Innovators list, in the Emerging Enterprise category covering organisations with 201 to 999 employees, and appeared on the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies for the fifth consecutive year.
The dual recognition comes as Integris expands its national and international footprint. The company is backed by the private equity arm of OMERS, the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, which provides institutional capital to support that expansion. No new funding, revenue figures, or specific growth metrics were disclosed in the announcement.
AI services push
The strategic centrepiece of Integris's current growth narrative is its CORE managed services offering, which the company positions as built for the AI era. CORE bundles IT infrastructure management, cybersecurity, governance, automation and AI enablement into a single product aimed at small and midsize businesses (SMBs). The company says the intent is to help clients move beyond AI experimentation and into measurable operational adoption.
Chief innovation officer Ross Sardi said the company's focus is on "embedding AI into how we work and helping our customers apply it in practical ways that improve operations and deliver measurable value." CEO and founder Rashaad Bajwa framed the two rankings as validation of an approach that links staff upskilling with customer outcomes.
The Fast Company programme specifically cited Integris's internal AI initiatives, which the company says are being rolled out across departments to change working practices rather than sit in isolated pilots.
Market context
The managed services provider (MSP) market serving SMBs is highly fragmented, with thousands of regional operators competing on price, response time and increasingly on AI tooling credentials. A small cohort of PE-backed national players, including Integris, have been consolidating regional MSPs to build geographic coverage and cross-sell professional services. OMERS Private Equity has a pattern of supporting such buy-and-build strategies in technology services.
The Inc. 5000 benchmark is worth contextualising: across all 5,000 companies on this year's list the median three-year revenue growth rate was 130 per cent, against which Integris's own figures were not disclosed. The award is self-reported and not independently audited, which limits its value as a competitive benchmark.
Regulatory tailwinds are also relevant for the SMB segment Integris targets. The EU's NIS2 Directive and its UK equivalent are pushing mid-market businesses to raise their cybersecurity baseline, creating demand for managed services that bundle compliance support alongside infrastructure management. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission has signalled continued scrutiny of data-handling practices for service providers that touch consumer data, which could accelerate SMB demand for governance-led managed services of the kind Integris says it offers.
What to watch
For investors and potential clients evaluating Integris, the near-term signals to monitor include the pace of further acquisitions under OMERS backing, the commercial uptake of the CORE platform beyond its current customer base, and whether the company publishes verifiable AI-outcome benchmarks for its SMB clients. Rankings from Fast Company and Inc. are useful employer-brand signals, but the managed services market will ultimately be won on retention rates, net revenue per customer, and documented security outcomes.