8×8 Expands Cloud Hosting Services With Zerigo Acquisition

June 21, 2011 Off By David
Grazed from CRN.  Author: Chad Berndtson.

Hosted VoIP and cloud services provider 8×8 has acquired Zerigo, a Littleton, Colo.-based specialist in virtual private services, managed DNS and monitoring tools. 8×8 focuses on SMB customers, and the move expands what it can provide for cloud hosting services, 8×8 said Monday.

Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed. Zerigo provisions virtual private services on a monthly basis, and cloud servers on an hourly basis using its own virtualization technology and data centers based in Denver, Dallas, Washington DC, London, Amsterdam and Singapore.

Zerigo offers native IPv6 connectivity, supports 32- and 64-bit versions of various operating systems with RAID-10 storage and server provisioning, and can also upgrade and downgrade systems in real time. The company’s Watchdog service provides 24/7 monitoring for all Zerigo provisioned services using a central dashboard and various monitoring services.

Zerigo CEO Tom Morgan, who will become 8×8 Cloud Architect following the acquisition, said Zerigo is thrilled to join the 8×8 team.

"8×8 is one of the leading cloud communications companies in the world and has developed a world-class operations and support infrastructure which will enable Zerigo to focus on research and development activities toward new 8×8 services and offerings," Morgan said in a statement.

"Zerigo’s software technologies will greatly enhance the capabilities of 8×8’s cloud hosting services by providing real-time provisioning and elasticity of our compute services," said Bryan Martin, 8×8’s chairman and CEO, in a statement. "We are excited to make Zerigo’s existing technologies available to our customers and plan to extend them to our enterprise-class private cloud and VMware offerings. The Zerigo acquisition will significantly advance our research and development activities in this area."

8×8’s last major M&A move was in May 2010, when it acquired Central Host for about $1 million. The Zerigo acquisition continues an ongoing wave of M&A activity among cloud-focused service providers, including M5 Networks’ recent purchase of Callfinity.

8×8 was featured on CRN’s list of the 75 Coolest Telecom Service Provider companies last year.