"It's only their investment that we are using and . . . it's a much larger investment stake than vSpring has been used to making in the past," Dave Taylor, chief marketing officer and a Sparxent cofounder, said.

Sparxent is a consulting business that targets midsize companies with "unsophisticated" information technology departments, Taylor said. Its 200 employees help clients fix hardware and software problems they can't solve by themselves.

In announcing its formation, Sparxent said it arose from the acquisition of NetworkD Corp., a Newport Beach, Calif., consulting business with 6,000 customers in the United States and Europe. Dartmouth College, Heineken France and Fujitsu Services are some of its clients.

Sparxent also said it has signed a letter of intent to buy Arbyte Group, a Moscow-based technology service provider with 10,000 customers in Russia and Ukraine.

"What this deal does, it gives Sparxent a global footprint," said Paul Ahlstrom, a vSpring managing director. "It gives us feet on the ground in Russia, in England, throughout the United States and a lot of Europe."

The size of vSpring's investment wasn't revealed. But it was big enough for Sparxent to buy 12-year-old NetworkD and 14-year-old Arbyte, Taylor said.

It was also sufficient to finance the purchase of more companies by the end of this year, he said.

Taylor declined to identify the companies it's targeting. But they should kick in another $30 million in revenue, bringing Sparxent's total to roughly $100 million, he said.

Taylor said Sparxent is moving into an under-served part of technology consulting - firms with fewer than 5,000 workers. So-called "mid-market" companies that need help figuring out how to harness technology have had few options. Companies serving bigger businesses are too expensive. And smaller consultants either offer software from a few manufacturers or sell software from a variety of vendors but have limited knowledge of how to mesh them.

"We can go deep on all of the solutions that a mid-sized company needs," Taylor said.

Taylor previously worked in a variety of management positions at LANDesk, a Salt Lake County-based Intel spinoff that made software for desktops, servers and mobile devices. In 2006, LANDesk was bought for $416 million by Avocent Corp., a Huntsville, Ala., maker of switching systems used to manage servers.