Earthlink Augments Cloud Plan by Buying Centerbeam

Earthlink, one of a handful of pioneering Internet service providers when it launched 19 years ago, revealed June 17 that it will acquire Centerbeam, a 13-year-old privately held cloud and managed services provider, for about $22 million in cash. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter.
Atlanta-based Earthlink is transitioning from dial-up and high-speed ISP services for 150,000 enterprises and 1 million consumers to become a full-service IT and cloud services provider for middle-market customers.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Centerbeam specializes in providing remote managed IT services to midrange enterprises with multiple locations. It operates a 140-person IT Support Center that provides help desk, desktop technical support and application support services.
Centerbeam will fill a number of IT holes—mainly around scale, collaboration and redundancy—in the platform Earthlink is building, EarthLink Chairman and CEO Rolla P. Huff said.
Earthlink plans to accelerate its product capabilities for hosted collaboration services and unified end point management services. The company will offer Centerbeam’s 365+ Enterprise Cloud service, which provides a full suite of collaboration services, along with its nationwide Hosted Voice platform, which it deploys through its existing distribution channels.
Earthlink also will integrate Centerbeam’s service control portal with its myLink next-generation control portal.