Rural Acquisitions Happen Too

What if you were a company that long ago was created to be a volume buying group for RLECs and owned by a bunch of IOCs? Then time passes and long distance minutes are declining. The FCC mandates that even RLECs have to transition from TDM to IP for voice. Oh, and that RLEC funding through the Universal Service fund was going to transition from voice lines to broadband lines. RLECs would be in a panic and start to sell/merge.

And this has been happening. Pretty often actually. Shenandoah Telecom just finished acquiring NTELOS Holdings Corp. This is just one example.

But back to the holding company for LD volume buying (HoldingCo), it talks the Board into investing in Broadsoft infrastructure to start white-labeling Hosted PBX for its members in October of 2013. Sonus gear is used as well.

Now, two and on-half years later, it has churned through personnel, the C-Suite, business plans and cash. About 100 companies jumped on to be partners. Apparently, that wasn’t nearly enough to keep everyone happy.

A source confirmed that this company was acquired by Onvoy today. That seems weird except for the VoIP orig/Term business. What does Onvoy do with the Sonus and Broadsoft infrastructure? And the 100 partners? I would sell them to either CoreDial or VoIP Logic. Unless Onvoy is going to get into the Broadsoft white-label game — to compete against 620 global carriers offering Broadsoft, many of whom are clients of Onvoy now.

Onvoy already acquired Broadvox, Vitelity and Layered Comms to become the third largest CLEC in the US. And earlier this year, a PE firm bought out Onvoy. [GTCR also owned Zayo Group before it went public.] PE likes growth. Easiest path to growth is to buy.

GTCR also is invested in Rural Broadband Investments,which acquires and invests in rural-focused cable systems serving residential and commercial customers in small- to middle-sized markets and rural geographies. [website] There is a fit there.

HoldingCo still has minutes – and 100 partners – so there is some money to be made here, but not from the insignificant number of seats of hosted PBX. Also, there is something to be said for relationships in the RLEC/IOC community.

Waiting on confirmation or a link to the acquisition.

Just another Broadsoft acquisition.

And a source told me that GoDaddy is getting into the HPBX space with a small acquisition! A little like what Intermedia.Net did years ago.

Just a month after GoDaddy unveils a possible competitor to Amazon’s cloud computing business, its chief technology officer and executive vice president of its cloud computing business group, Elissa Murphy, has resigned – to go to Google!

Tags: broadsoft, mergers, rural, voip
Related tags: volume buying, cloud computing, computing business, broadsoft infrastructure, onvoy, broadsoft