Windstream Strikes Again, Buys Hosted Solutions

Windstream (NYSE:WIN, news, filings) has been quite busy this year already, but they aren’t done yet. Today the company announced its intention to acquire Hosted Solutions from the private equity firm ABRY for $310M.  Hosted Solutions operates multiple data centers in Raleigh, Charlotte, and Boston.  The acquisition will bring Windstream’s datacenter count up to 12, and will add 65K square feet to their footprint.  Hosted Solutions did $51.7M in revenue in the twelve months ending on September 30, 2010, with $25.7M in adjusted EBITDA.  Those are some pretty healthy margins.

Hosted Solutions offers a variety of managed hosting services – Infrastructure as a Service as it’s known these days.  Windstream’s other acquisitions lately have been NuVox, Iowa Telecom and the still pending Kentucky Datalink.  Hosting Solutions fits alongside a growing focus on the business market – both as an ILEC and a CLEC.  I doubt they’re done yet.  Windstream is operating with a plan here, and the copy of the blueprints we’ve got seems incomplete.  But in the short term, perhaps they will be content to integrate all this stuff for a while.

As for ABRY, they certainly are actively cycling assets in and out of their portfolio.  In the outward direction seems to be datacenter and colocation though, as they also unloaded CyrusOne back in May to an ILEC – in that case it was Cincinnati Bell.  They bought RCN back in the spring of course, then rebranded the RCN Metro division as Sidera Networks and are thought to be looking to consolidate more with that asset.  Perhaps now they have a bit more firepower in that effort.

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Categories: Datacenter · ILECs, PTTs · Mergers and Acquisitions