Internap's move to acquire Voxel Holdings, a hosting and cloud services provider, illustrates the growing trend of how service providers are expanding their data center and hosting capabilities via targeted purchases. Under the terms of the agreement, Internap purchased Voxel for about $30 million in cash and another $5 million in cash tied to the delivery of specific objectives over the next two years.
The deal closed last Friday, Dec. 30.
What does Internap gain by buying Voxel? It will immediately expand its global presence not only in North America, but also in key countries including Europe and Asia, and gain 1,000 customers.
Internap said the acquisition will enhance its IT infrastructure platform with new automated tools and self service capabilities that it can immediately provide to its existing customer base. What's more, Voxel will enable the service provider to serve early- to mid-stage IT infrastructure customers that want dedicated hosting services.
The acquisition of Voxel appears to be in line with Internap CEO Eric Cooney's desire to remain an independent company during a time of rapid consolidation of the data center and cloud services market.
Of course, Internap is not the only one getting into the hosted services and data center acquisition game. Over the past year, there have been a slew of deals by large telephone company incumbents like CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) to beef up their data center/hosting business. Not far behind the large incumbents have independent telcos like TDS (NYSE: TDS), Warwick Valley Telephone (Nasdaq: WWVY), and Windstream (Nasdaq: WIN) striking deals for data center/hosting companies including Hosted Solutions, OneNeck IT and Alteva.
For more:
- see the release
Special report: The most important M&As of 2011
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