**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting mergers in Q1 2015.**

By Edward Gately

SingleHop, a provider of cloud-enabled managed hosting and on-demand cloud infrastructure, today announced its acquisition of Datagram, a New York-based provider of hosting, Internet access, colocation and disaster recovery services.

This is Chicago-based SingleHop’s second acquisition this year, following its purchase of Orlando-based Server Intellect in March. The addition of Datagram allows SingleHop to expand its hosted private cloud services into the Northeast market with additional data centers in New York and Connecticut.

Mark Mercado, SingleHop’s vice president of channel sales, tells Channel Partners the acquisition presents new opportunities in that the “complementary product offerings give partners a deeper set of solutions to leverage in solving customer data center, infrastructure, DRaaS, BaaS and hosting cloud issues.”

“SingleHop has a well-established broad partner program of over 300 entities made up of VARs, system integrators, IT consultants, MSPs, resellers and [a] strong base of master agents,” he said. “While Datagram worked strategically with a handful of key partners, both organizations are focused on continuing to cultivate and drive business through the channel.”

The companies are not disclosing financial details of the acquisition.

“Datagram and SingleHop share the same vision of making best-of-breed technology easy to deploy and use for enterprise customers,” said Zak Boca, SingleHop’s CEO. “The acquisition comes at a time when many enterprises, especially those in the media and entertainment space, are looking for ways to reduce their capital costs, increase their agility and offload routine IT functions to providers.”

During the past 20 years, Datagram has grown from a small company with a single server to a large provider of colocation and IT services. It provides enterprise colocation, hosting and network services to medium and large enterprises in the compliance, media, entertainment and financial services industries.

“Together with SingleHop, we are now able to offer our customers a far greater degree of management and control over their data at a time when the demands of workload management is stifling innovation in many organizations,” said Alex Reppen, Datagram’s CEO.

When the acquisition is completed, Datagram will continue to operate as an independent business unit of SingleHop, and effective immediately it will be able to deploy its services across all of SingleHop’s locations. Its office operations, sales, support, marketing and other business aspects will remain intact, but will be expanded as SingleHop continues to invest in its services and growth.

“The acquisition of Datagram presents new revenue opportunities by extending SingleHop services into the Northeast U.S. market with two additional data centers (New York and Connecticut) and by extending the solutions of each organization to the combined customer base,” Mercado said.