EarthLink may have lost gobs of money last quarter, but that didn’t stop it from shelling out $22 million to buy MSP CenterBeam.
While EarthLink was making its move, Accumuli was accumulating MSP Signify Solutions, which does two-factor authentication (2FA). And here’s a weird little fact: both acquired MSPs are 13 years old.
In its latest quarter, EarthLink lost $236.4 million, but the company did a one-time “goodwill impairment” charge of $256.7 million. Without that charge, the loss is $7.5 million.
So what the heck is a goodwill impairment? This is an accounting technique used by public companies to account for changes in their market value, similar to a write-down.
For instance, if a public company makes an acquisition, and the value of that asset falls, you could do an impairment. The same is true if the company’s reputation is harmed and its overall value falls.
CenterBeam is located in the epicenter of Silicon Valley in Sunnyvale. Aimed at mid-sized businesses with multiple locations, the company focuses primarily on remote managed IT services. Backing all of this up is an IT Support Center with 140 staffers that handles application and desktop support, as well as help desk.
In fact, the IT services market is just what EarthLink was digging into. “The acquisition of CenterBeam will fast-track our IT Services product development by providing us with critical scale and complementary product capabilities geared towards our multi-location business target market,” said EarthLink Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Rolla P. Huff. “CenterBeam's advanced set of products, tools and processes will enable us to quickly bring a robust set of remote managed IT Services and collaboration services to market. Additionally, CenterBeam's IT Support Center will provide expertise, scale and redundancy to our existing EarthLink TechCare remote help desk.”
One item EarthLink is particularly interested in is the CenterBeam 365+ cloud suite. The fact this sounds so similar to Microsoft Office 365 is no coincidence – it’s based on Office 365! A big difference is how Microsoft and CenterBeam handle Exchange in the cloud.
“Unlike Exchange Online, CenterBeam 365+ does not eliminate many of the features of the on-premise Exchange solution. Instead, CenterBeam 365+ delivers in the cloud 17 on-premise features of Exchange in the categories of administration, applications, client access, compliance/archiving, directory, security and voice mail,” the company said.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
