Cbeyond, Inc. has spent the past month steadily building out its physical footprint—MSP and VAR channel partnerships and programs as well as its cloud and managed services offerings. Those investments have paid off, and Birch Communications, Inc. announced it is purchasing the company for around $323 million.
The all-cash deal will create a giant provider of cloud, communications and managed services bringing in about $700 million in annual revenues. The combined companies have 200,000 business customers throughout the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico, comprised of startup companies, SMBs and an enterprise with multiple offices and data centers.
Together, Cbeyond and Birch will provide a national IP network with around 10,000 fiber route miles, more than 500 fiber-lit buildings, 570 colocation spaces and five data centers. Birch has completed 21 acquisitions in recent years, building up its network of voice, data, communications and managed services.
"This transaction will create a nationwide communications and technology services powerhouse and significantly advances our strategy to drive top-line revenue growth by enhancing the premier communications, cloud and managed services that are available to our business customers," said Vincent M. Oddo, president and CEO of Birch. "The combined company will have a nationwide IP-network with a significant fiber infrastructure, an extensive data center presence in multiple markets, and a relentless focus on providing superior customer service."
“We have been strengthening the Cbeyond franchise with our 2.0 transformation; the wider reach with Birch enables the combined companies to increase service levels with a broad array of products to a larger number of customers," added James Geiger, founder, chairman and CEO of Cbeyond.
The company’s recent initiatives include a partnership with Microsoft, encouraging MSPs and VARs to migrate their SMB customers to the Cbeyond cloud. The move highlights Microsoft’s Cloud OS technologies like Windows Server, Hyper-V and System Center. Cbeyond also recently rolled out their TotalCloud Foundation, enabling white labeling and management of their cloud platform for MSPs and channel partners. And in early March, the cloud provider opened a new regional data center in Las Vegas, focused on MSP support based on the TotalCloud platform. The facility effectively doubled Cbeyond’s cloud data center infrastructure capacity.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
