**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting mergers in November-December 2016.**

Workspace-as-a-service platform (WaaS) provider CloudJumper on Tuesday announced the acquisition of a competitor’s IT services business unit that will expand the company’s channel with more than 50 MSPs and ISVs. The deal actually closed earlier this month, according to the company.

Making it’s first foray into the M&A arena, CloudJumper picks up not only the business segment but also associated employees which it will role into its WaaS portfolio. The name of the seller and price of the transaction was not disclosed, although both the seller and CloudJumper are IndependenceIT partners.

“For us this is a pretty big step and when everything is put together and integrated – which we should have done by the end of February or first part of March – we’ll have well over 10,000 seats in our workspace-as-a-service platform at that point,” company president JD Helms told us.

CloudJumper also picks up five data center partners and associates. The partners who join CloudJumper with this transaction will get access to the vendor’s portfolio of services found in its my.CloudJumper partner portal.{ad}

Helms expects the acquisition to allow the company to double its 2017 growth projections. CluudJumper already adds hundreds of new seats into its platform on a monthly basis, so with the addition of the new unit and 2017 growth projections from existing partners, the company president expects to see growth for the year quadruple.

“This is a really big win for not only us but also for the partners who came through that transaction. We believe this acquisition is not only going to pay dividends in a revenue cash-flow perspective and growing critical mass, but there were a lot of partners who were wanting to grow that business space but were having struggles with some of the complexity that we already figured out, such as management, and ease of visibility into the systems,” Helms said.

CloudJumper has already completed most of the work to integrate the acquired business unit into the company, with all of that work expected to be finished by next week, according to Max Pruger, chief sales officer at CloudJumper.

Less than a year ago, CloudJumper was spun off from of cloud-based application provider nGenx. The company is 100 percent channel-led and has an agent channel and a white-label MSP channel for a total of about 500 active partners.

With consolidation expected to occur in the WaaS market segment, don’t be surprised to see more acquisitions by CloudJumper.