Biggest M&A of Nov.-Dec. 2015

An extremely busy year of wheeling and dealing finished with a bang as a number of telecom and tech companies closed acquisitions or announced new purchases that will have impacts in the channel.

Among them were a big buy by ShoreTel to boost its UC portfolio; yet another acquisition by Cisco, this one bringing analytics to its Security Everywhere platform; and the major speculation that a sale of Verizon’s Terremark data-center assets could be imminent.

Our one-stop slide show doesn’t include every merger and acquisition in telecom and IT from November and December, but it offers up some of the biggest from the past two months that will make waves in the channel going forward.

Looking for more M&A? Our breakdown from September and October, including acquisitions by Vonage, Windstream, Integra and Dell, is here.

Follow senior online managing editor Craig Galbraith on Twitter.

ShoreTel anticipates the purchase of the call-center software and cloud provider will accelerate its fiscal 2017 hosted revenue growth by about 30 percent. It said it would pay $8.5 million in cash to acquire Corvisa, which represents a portion of the parent company’s revenue, expenses and employee base. The deal closed last week. Both ShoreTel and Corvisa have partner programs. No word yet how they might be impacted.

Click here to read more about ShoreTel’s plans with its Corvisa assets.

Reuters reported that Verizon was considering selling off its Terremark data-center unit as well as “the business formerly known as MCI, which provides landline and Internet services for large business customers,” assets worth $10 billion. Terremark, which Verizon bought for $1.4 billion in 2011, forms the basis of the company’s cloud offering. The carrier denied the report, but the talk surfaced again in early January with Verizon offering no comment.

Learn more about the Verizon-Terremark chatter here.

Cisco paid almost $453 million for Lancope, saying that acquiring the network behavior analytics provider was a key part of its Security Everywhere strategy. David Goeckeler serves as the senior vice president and general manger of the Cisco Security Business Group, the organization Lancope joined.

Click here for the full scoop on Cisco’s Lancope acquisition.

Citrix’s spinoff of its GoTo business – expected to wrap in the second half of 2016 – would create a publicly traded company in which Citrix shareholders would own shares. Citrix explained in a news release that spinning off the business was a tax-free way to adopt “more quickly to the SaaS market.” Programs in the GoTo family include GoToAssist, GoToMeeting, Grasshopper and OpenVoice.

Citrix announced 1,000 layoffs along with the spinoff.

Read all about what’s happening at Citrix here.

Networking solutions provider Lightower Fiber Networks announced its acquisition of network assets from HarborLite Networks. The agreement increased Lightower’s network density in the downtown Baltimore region, where HarborLite is based. Lightower said its footprint will serve Baltimore customers in more than 15,000 locations.

Learn more about Lightower’s fiber acquisition here.

EVault provides business-continuity and disaster-recovery services for SMBs and small enterprises. The $14 million deal provides Carbonite with disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) capabilities. The company said it can provide a full suite of services that meet the needs of all SMBs, a market estimated to be worth $13 billion in the United States and more than $40 billion globally. Carbonite has more than 7,000 partners, ranging from VARs to MSPs.

Click here to learn more about the benefits Carbonite gets with this acquisition.

The acquisition agreement between Green Cloud Technologies and the IaaS and SaaS provider ANS Corp. closed on Oct. 31. As a result, Green Cloud now has a third production data center – this one in Akron, Ohio, where ANS is based. Spring Capital Partners invested $5 million in Green Cloud for sales and marketing in the company’s channel program.

Click here to read more about why Green Cloud is excited about this purchase.

The terms of the agreement dictate that cloud-based call center technology providers TCN and Global Connect will merge to be the “industry’s leading provider of diversified cloud-based contact center solutions.” TCN said the merger will expand its market reach and strengthen its contact center offerings.

Click here to read more about what this merger might do for channel partners.

Cradlepoint, a provider of software-defined 4G-LTE network services, said Pertino’s cloud platform and technical expertise help it to bring software-defined networking (SDN) to 4G LTE networks for small, medium and large enterprises; SMBs; government and carrier organizations. Financial details regarding the acquisition were not disclosed.

Read more about Cradlepoint’s Pertino cloud buy here.