Intermedia’s Big Hosted PBX, Cloud VoIP Play: Coming Soon?

Intermedia, a Top 100 Cloud Services Provider, sounds like it’s close to becoming a major player in the hosted PBX market. Already a leader in hosted Exchange, the company has been pushing aggressively into the cloud office and file syncing/sharing markets. Along the way, Intermedia has recruited and engaged roughly 13,000 channel partners — many of which are MSPs. Next up is a serious hosted PBX and VoIP services push, which could position the company against 8×8 and Ring Central — though those companies are technically smaller than Intermedia’s overall business.

Intermedia back in January 2013 acquired Telanetix (which does business as Accessline) for roughly $55 million. But telecom-related buyouts often face regulatory review. During a catch-up call with Talkin’ Cloud, Intermedia President Michael Gold said he expects the deal to close soon, though he couldn’t offer any deeper details about an estimated closing date. 

When the deal does close, it sounds like Intermedia will gain roughly $30 million to $35 million or so in annual hosted VoIP, unified communications and related services revenues.

One Trick Pony? Not Anymore

Gold has spent the past year or two diversifying Intermedia’s revenue stream beyond hosted Exchange — though that business continues to perform well. Among Intermedia’s milestones, the company has:

• Nearly 650,000 hosted Exchange mailboxes, making it the largest player in the market other than Microsoft itself. The next largest player is roughly 400,000 mailboxes, Gold said, though Talkin’ Cloud has not confirmed the figure independently.
• Roughly 13,000 channel partners. MSPs rank among its closest partners. But keep an eye on the telco market, folks. That’s where Intermedia now has roughly 10 partners — though the telcos typically don’t announce the relationships publicly.
• Pushed into the file sharing and syncing market, positioning against Box and Dropbox in the business market. Gold says channel partners can truly control and manage its file sharing solution, called SecuriSync. “It’s the fastest-growing product we’ve ever launched,” he says. No doubt, file sharing and syncing is a hot market — but dozens of potential rivals have also popped up.

Where does Intermedia — and its channel partner base — go from here? Talkin’ Cloud is keeping our eyes on the company’s hosted PBX, VoIP and unified communications efforts. Rewind a few years and Intermedia had a home-grown unified communications platform called Unison. That never really took off (I’ll give readers a separate update on the new, unrelated, separately owned Unison brand in a few days). But this time around, Intermedia is armed with AccessLine’s technology and customer base — once that deal is completed.

We’re also watching to see Intermedia’s potential next financial steps. Asked if the company will seek an IPO, Gold said Intermedia is “large enough, growing fast enough and pretty profitable”for that option. “It’s certainly an option but I don’t know yet,” he added.