Another Acquisition in VoIP

This M&A is in what I consider wholesale as the private equity firm that owns Onvoy, GTCR, is acquiring Inteliquent for about $800M, a 37% premium to Inteliquent’s closing stock price. Interesting, $90M in revenue for $800M.

Inteliquent was formerly known as Neutral Tandem, with an initial business plan to be an alternative tandem switching platform for CLECs and VoIP Providers. They re-branded after they bought Tinet adding network to their strong voice service. They sold Tinet to GTT in 2013 for about $55M. Inteliquent has been focused on voice and competing pretty well against both Level3 and Bandwidth.

“As the nation’s highest quality provider of voice and messaging interconnection services, Inteliquent is used by nearly all national and regional wireless carriers, cable companies, and CLECs in the markets it serves, and its network carries approximately 21 billion minutes of traffic per month.” They added some CPaaS capability as well. I have to wonder 21B in minutes and just $90M in annual revenue?

Zayo spun out its voice business as Onvoy. It was acquired by GTCR. Onvoy has acquired ANPI, Broadvox and Layered. Now it will combine Inteliquent into that mix.

These deals have made partners and customers nervous. The uncertainty seems to be a normal now.

These integrations are smooth and often have some customer facing problems. (See Frontier for how that works.) There is so much M&A that as a partner it is difficult to choose who to present to your client as a vendor.

Tags: inter-carrier compensation, mergers, voip, wireline
Related tags: onvoy acquired, inteliquent, voice, onvoy