EarthLink bolsters IT services play with $22 million CenterBeam purchase

June 17, 2013 | By Sean Buckley

EarthLink (Nasdaq: ELNK) has signed an agreement to acquire CenterBeam for $22 million, a move that will enhance its growing base of IT solutions for its growing middle market business customer base.

After meeting customary closing conditions, EarthLink said that the deal, which is structured as an asset purchase, will close early in Q3 2013.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based CenterBeam has developed its business around providing managed IT services mainly to the multi-location mid-sized businesses. It also runs a 140-person IT Support Center where it provides help desk, desktop technical support and application support services.  

"CenterBeam's advanced set of products, tools and processes will enable us to quickly bring a robust set of remote managed IT Services and collaboration services to market," said Rolla P. Huff, EarthLink's chairman and CEO, in a release about the acquisition. "Additionally, CenterBeam's IT Support Center will provide expertise, scale and redundancy to our existing EarthLink TechCare remote help desk."
Upon completion of this acquisition, EarthLink said it will offer CenterBeam's 365+ Enterprise Cloud service, which provides a full suite of collaboration services, along with its nationwide Hosted Voice platform, through its existing distribution channels. In addition, EarthLink will integrate CenterBeam's service control portal with its myLink next generation control portal.

CenterBeam represents the ongoing trend in EarthLink's buying patterns. Over the past two years, it has bolstered its managed IT services portfolio with other purchases such as Business Vitals and Synergy Global Solutions.

Supporting its growing base of cloud and managed IT services, EarthLink has been expanding its fiber network and data center presence into new markets, including the recent completion of its new data center in San Jose. It has also completed data centers in Chicago, Dallas, Rochester and its Miami data center is going through the final system turn up and testing process.