Penton Media Acquires Talkin’ Cloud and Nine Lives Media

Mergers and acquisitions are commonplace in the cloud computing market. Now, Talkin’ Cloud is part of that M&A activity. Specifically, Nine Lives Media Inc., creator of Talkin’ Cloud, has been acquired by Penton Media. The Nine Lives business and all of our leading IT channel communities — Talkin’ Cloud, MSPmentor and The VAR Guy — are now part of Penton’s Technology Group, effective immediately.

Talkin’ Cloud debuted in December 2010 and has quickly emerged as the top IT Channel destination for cloud-related conversations. Under Penton Media’s ownership, Talkin’ Cloud will continue to serve VARs, MSPs and cloud services providers (CSPs) that are seeking to navigate the cloud computing market.

We’re poised for more growth as we join Penton. Led by CEO Sharon Rowlands, Penton attracted more than 90 million individuals to its websites last year. In fact, Penton is the largest privately held B2B publisher in the United States.

Nine Lives and our brands join Penton Media’s Technology Group — which includes the Windows IT Pro community and other powerful brands. The Nine Lives business unit reports into Peg Miller, Penton’s Technology Group Market Leader.

In a prepared statement, Miller said:

“Nine Lives is the perfect complement to our leading IT and developer brands, enabling us to provide both business and technology acumen to the entire technology ecosystem of IT professionals and developers, channel providers, and independent software vendors and hardware vendors. We’ve already seen strong growth in the IT channel with adoption of our newly launched Penton Marketing Services — helping them to run their businesses more effectively.”

Our sales and editorial teams remain in place — and fully focused on serving you. Matt Weinberger and I continue to blog for Talkin’ Cloud. Now, our business and our blogs are backed by Penton. That’s a winning combination for our readers and our sponsors.