Managed Service Provider Week in Review

The big news in the managed services space this week is Birch Communications’ planned acquisition of Cbeyond, Inc. for $323 million. Cbeyond has been steadily growing and expanding its footprint as well as generating a variety of cloud and managed services offerings in an attempt to court more MSP and VAR partnerships.

The purchase by Birch will essentially create a massive provider of cloud, communications and managed services with annual revenues in the neighborhood of $700 million. The combined companies will also offer a national IP network of around 10,000 fiber route miles along with five data centers and 570 colocation facilities.

On the IaaS front, Google is proving to be a worthy competitor to AWS, the current market leader. The companies have been capitalizing on the cloud model of delivering cloud storage and data on a utility-type billing basis, and together their revenues are expected to surpass $40 billion by the end of the decade. The IaaS space is still maturing, however, and powerful competitors like Microsoft, IBM and Rackspace are steadily gaining momentum and marketshare.

Speaking of services, iland announced a new Disaster Recovery Planning and Assessment service this week. Offered on a DRaaS basis, the new solution gives users a comprehensive analysis for planning and executing speedy recoveries regardless of the size of their IT infrastructure.

In funding news, Electric Cloud brought in $4 million this week as part of a total $12 million Series E investment round. The company, which offers continuous delivery solutions, will use the funds to expand its business and revenue shares.

MSP PC Network Services also received an investment this week for an undisclosed amount in support of expanding its services and geographic presence the company named Michael Halperin as its new CEO in conjunction with the new funding.