Biggest M&A of April

The number of mergers and acquisitions with an impact on the telecom and IT channels kept up its blistering pace in April.

Not long after closing its huge EarthLink acquisition, Windstream announced it would buy Broadview Networks for almost a quarter-billion dollars. Intelisys scooped up a key Verizon partner. CenturyLink revealed important news about its structure once its mega-acquisition of Level 3 Communications is complete.

But that’s not all. We break down news surrounding 11 new mergers and updates to previously announced acquisitions in this gallery. Click through to see the blockbuster M&A activity you might’ve missed last month.

Looking for more M&A? Click here to see the wheeling and dealing that went down in February and March.

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Windstream signed an agreement to acquire Broadview Networks, the provider of cloud-based UC to SMBs, in an all-cash transaction valued at nearly $228 million.

Broadview offers a suite of cloud-based services under the OfficeSuite UC brand. Wasting no time, Windstream just completed its $1.1 billion acquisition of EarthLink in February.

Check out the details of this latest deal.

ScanSource-owned Intelisys announced at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo that it will buy the channel assets of Kingcom, a master agent known for its exclusive relationship with Verizon.

ScanSource CEO Mike Baur said the plan to acquire Kingcom has been developing since announcing the acquisition of Intelisys last August.

Read what Janet Schijns, vice president of solutions and sales channels for Verizon Business Markets, said about the deal.

CenturyLink announced the senior leadership team that will report to president and CEO Glen Post III once its acquisition of Level 3 Communications closes.

The tie-up will create the second-largest domestic communications provider serving global enterprise customers. Both companies’ boards of directors have approved the $34 billion purchase.

Learn more about the CenturyLink-Level 3 acquisition and who will lead the company upon completion.

Extreme Networks announced the $55 million acquisition of Brocade’s data-center networking unit, which followed word that it plans to buy Avaya’s networking business.

This comes a year after Brocade purchased Ruckus Wireless and months after Broadcom announced it would buy Brocade for about $6 billion.

View a summary of Extreme Networks’ M&A activity.

Spanning, the SaaS backup and recovery vendor, is being spun off from Dell Technologies and acquired by Insight Venture Partners. Dell inherited Spanning as part of its acquisition of EMC. EMC acquired Spanning in October 2014.

Get more detail on Spanning’s history.

Riverbed Technology is acquiring Xirrus in an effort to expand its SD-WAN solution. Xirrus is known for cloud-managed Wi-Fi services, which Riverbed said will give customers and partners unified connectivity and policy-based orchestration.

Learn more about what Riverbed plans to do with the acquisition.

Arcserve is acquiring FastArchiver, which will integrate into Arcserve’s data protection platform. Arcserve UDP Archiving stores emails that are on premises, in a public or private cloud in an independent location.

Read more about Arcserve’s acquisition plans.

EarthBend, a value-added distributor of telco and IT services, acquired Clear2there, a provider of video surveillance, smart-home, smart-business, smart-farm applications and Internet of Things (IoT) offerings for service providers and enterprises.

Clear2there’s platform gives users the ability to monitor and manage a location – or multiple locations – from any smartphone, tablet or Internet-connected device.

Get details on EarthBend’s purchase. 

Green House Data acquired Cirracore, an Atlanta-based infrastructure provider of enterprise-ready infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and hybrid cloud products.

The Cirracore customer list includes a strong presence in the Southeast, as well as large national and international brands.

Learn more about what Green House has been doing.

Salestream Software, a provider of lead-to-cash software offerings for the telecom industry, took to the Channel Partners Conference & Expo stage to announce it is merging with mTusker, an ERP and CRM sales and operational software provider.

Salestream is the larger of the two companies and its name will be retained for the combined organization.

Check out the details of the merger.

Broadvoice, the provider of hosted voice, UC and SIP trunking services for businesses, acquired XBP, a development-oriented company with telephony and contact-center services. XBP’s platform allows for the integration of simple communications platform as a service (CPaaS) and complex UCaaS applications.

Learn more about Broadvoice’s purchase.