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38 www.canadianlawyermag.com M&A and organic growth at Xplornet, a Woodstock, NB-headquartered tech company that offers voice and data commu- nication services through its hybrid fibre wireless and satellite broadband network. Although M&A has slowed this year, the legal team at Xplornet continues to focus on expansion through its internal builds. The company is rapidly expanding its fibre infrastructure across Canada, with fibre projects now in Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and PEI. "Our growth is a little unpredictable because we either build our own fibre network or we acquire targets who already have that network, and then we expand on it based on the opportunities," says Fabien Fourmanoit, vice president, legal, at Xplornet. "We have to be very agile in our strategy." Regarding M&A, Fourmanoit and his team are responsible for due diligence in all transactions to ensure the target meets the required standards. They also review all leases and underlying documents and work closely with the network team that examines newly acquired towers to ensure they are of a high enough standard to deploy Xplornet's equipment. Integration is also a critical part of the process for Fourmanoit and his team. "A lot of the work has to go into making sure that, post-acquisition, the service being provided to the customer meets their expectations," says Fourmanoit. "One of our goals with these acquisitions is to make sure that we serve customers better than they were being served [before]." "Now we're focused on developing the product road map and our vision for the future of commerce and our platform" Daniel Micak, Lightspeed media, while NuOrder provides the function- ality to connect merchants and suppliers and to provide more insight into what is available to merchants. "That functionality, which is really new in our space, is going to be a game-changer for us, so we're focusing a lot of our time and attention on that right now," says Micak. "We are very solutions-focused through this inte- gration phase, so we're looking at the plat- form and expanding our reach beyond the merchant to the supplier." Rapid expansion continues through TECHNOLOGY FEATURE