**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting merger and acquisition news from March.**

Fusion has had a busy week, first completing its purchase of Birch Communications’ cloud and business-services business, including its customers, operations and infrastructure, and then announcing its acquisition of MegaPath.

Matthew Rosen, Fusion’s chairman and CEO, tells Channel Partners that his company and Birch began working on integration strategies, process and procedures from the moment that acquisition was announced last August. The leadership team is in place and meetings with new team members have already begun, he said.

“The Birch brand will be retired within six months and we have begun the process of branding products and messaging, collaterals and forms to Fusion,” he said. “We are working to have all systems, infrastructure and network integrated within this calendar year.”

Rosen said Fusion’s partners will have more ways to sell and grow, with an expanded suite of services that integrates Birch’s voice service offerings with his company’s suite of single-source cloud solutions.

Birch partners will have a broader cloud services portfolio to sell to complement existing products and services, most notably SD-WAN.

“We’re emerging from this transaction as a truly disruptive force in the rapidly expanding cloud services marketplace, with more than 150,000 business customers in the United States and Canada, a 100 percent IP-based network, 31,000 fiber route miles of network and metro fiber assets across 11 major markets,” Rosen said. “With Fusion, our partners have the confidence in knowing that their customers’ quality of service (QoS) is guaranteed, with internet access, MPLS, SD-WAN connections, automatic failover, security and disaster recovery as a service.”

The combination broadens Fusion’s distribution and increases its infrastructure, allowing it and its partners to concentrate on larger enterprises, he said.

Partners continue to be served and supported by the same sales and support teams at the same contact numbers and through the same portals, Rosen said.

Business Network Team’s Mike Profant

“We will be integrating our customer-facing care and support teams, and systems in the near term for increased support,” he said. “Our winning combination gives our partners the competitive edge in driving digital transformation and enabling customers to increase productivity and efficiency in the workplace. With a full range of business voice and cloud solutions, Fusion can help our partners meet their customers’ needs based on their preferences, requirements and readiness.”

Business Network Team (BNT), a telecommunications and IT network consulting firm, is a Fusion partner.

“Collaboration with Fusion has yielded and continues to yield great success,” said Mike Profant, the firm’s president. “With the coming together of all three companies, Fusion, Birch, and MegaPath in the near future, BNT will engage even more partnership opportunities with Fusion to grow our mutual revenue.”