It’s been a busy last few months, punctuated by secret off-site meetings, i-banker code words, and lots of short hop flights between NYC and Montreal.
The news is finally out. As of a few hours ago — Internap is buying iWeb!
I’m super excited about the announcement and the implications for the combined company, although it’s really weird being on the other side of the table this time around! (Just about two years ago, Internap acquired Voxel, the company I founded back in 1999.)
We have been undergoing a transformation at Internap over the last few years. Acquiring Voxel was part of the foundation for that story. Today’s iWeb acquisition accelerates things significantly, and positions us to round the corner as a different animal altogether – a global IT infrastructure services company.
We are shedding our telco roots.
iWeb has built a truly global (50% of revenue outside North America) company, with a hyper-localized footprint in Montreal, Canada. They have a very sophisticated online marketing machine, and most of their demand is generated from their website. Internap has a truly global footprint, but most of our revenue comes from the domestic market. We have a big enterprise sales force that targets each local market; almost nothing is sold off our website.
See the obvious fit here?
iWeb recently chose to build out their back office data center automation platform with Ubersmith – Internap’s purpose-built platform. During my time working on iWeb’s Ubersmith implementation, it became clear to me we were dealing with an organization that really ‘gets hosting and cloud’. There is a similar story of commonality with OpenStack – something key to the future strategy of both companies. iWeb is punching above their weight already (#24 contributor in the community), and we are both hard at work deploying OpenStack under the hoods of our respective cloud offerings.
By joining forces, we should be able to increase velocity in these two key areas and, hopefully, work towards a single consolidated infrastructure platform.
Oh, and iWeb guys and gals: Don’t worry too much about these Internap people. They aren’t that bad; they just like wearing suits. The passion and culture of iWeb (as originally instilled by founders Eric and Martin and as carried on by folks like Christian and Cyrille) is one of your biggest assets. We absolutely recognize that. Not messing that up is really important to us, and to me personally.
Things are certainly going to get interesting!
