Wish your company would go a different direction? Buy it

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Chris Cameron and three partners led a buyout of Accent Communication Services.

Carrie Ghose

Staff reporter- Columbus Business First

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Chris Cameron's first job out of college was with Accent Communication Services Inc., where he spent seven years in sales. But he grew restless when the owners didn't share his ambitions for new technology and service lines.

The Delaware company founded in 1991 was well-established with Central Ohio customers and had succeeded through several economic downturns, he said, and founders wanted to stick with business phone systems and on-site IT services.

So in early 2011 Cameron left for jobs with Columbus software companies, where he learned more about the tech industry.

Cameron returned with three partners last October to lead a buyout of Accent. This year, the 33-year-old CEO took Accent to the cloud.

"It took a couple years to put the whole thing together," he said.

His partners include CFO Ryan Clark, who recently opened Accent's Minneapolis office, and two investors. One of the three founders stayed with the company.

Accent launched cloud-based disaster recovery and business continuity to back up client servers in December. Its servers are in the former DataCenter.bz data center in north Columbus, which was acquired and renamed by Cologix Inc. this February. In spring, it launched Accent Voice, hosting Internet-based phone service. The existing staff already had experience building systems and controls; the difference is where the hardware and software is located.

"Accent's heritage is in voice," Cameron said. "It only made sense for us to take the next step: to own manage and operate our own voice cloud, a voice-over-IP (Internet protocol) offering."

First clients included a school district and several small businesses, with some larger clients about to come on board that would bring the service in its first few months from zero to thousands of phone extensions. All are Ohio-based, but Accent is seeking to expand to other states through data center partnerships and re-sellers.

Carrie Ghose covers health care, startups and technology for Columbus Business First.