Intermedia news, News and announcements
Madison Dearborn Partners to Acquire Business Cloud Platform Provider Intermedia from Oak Hill Capital Partners
A new chapter for Intermedia
As you know, Intermedia has developed its brand as a pioneer in delivering secure, reliable, and highly-supported cloud business applications. Today, we’re very excited to announce that the company is being acquired by Madison Dearborn Partners (“MDP”), a leading private equity firm based in Chicago that has raised approximately $23 billion and made 130 investments.
As part of the transaction, our shareholders, led by Oak Hill Capital Partners (“Oak Hill”), will sell their stake in the company to MDP and company management.
Looking to the future
With Oak Hill we’ve built an incredibly strong foundation. Our partnership with MDP will further accelerate company growth through increased investment in our channel partner programs including our unique private label model, Worry-Free support experience, new and existing products, vertical industry solutions, and additional acquisitions. We are set for even bigger things to come as we tackle the $20+ billion cloud business applications market with MDP.
I asked Phil Koen, our Executive Chairman, and Mike Gold, our CEO, to share their views on what the future holds.
Phil sees it this way:
“First with Oak Hill, and now as we embark on this next chapter with MDP, Intermedia is well-positioned for further growth. With Oak Hill’s support, we’ve built a core technology platform, while expanding the applications suite on top. We look forward to building upon this momentum with the benefit of the MDP team’s expertise.”
Mike offers the channel perspective:
“I couldn’t be more excited about the vision that Intermedia and MDP share. Recognizing that the channel influences 65-75% of IT spending[1], we’ve built our business to meet the needs of the channel. Intermedia’s cloud applications and management platform provide a number of key benefits for our partners, including a private label model, as well as operational, technical, marketing, and sales support.”
Taking stock of a transformative five years
Since May 2011 when we were acquired by Oak Hill Capital Partners, Intermedia has more than tripled its revenues (to $200M), operating profits, users and product offerings. We’ve also experienced dramatic growth in our partner and customer base, having the privilege to serve 1,000,000+ users worldwide, in partnership with 6,000+ active partners and 75,000+ businesses. We’ve appointed terrific talent across the company, with our most recent additions being decorated channel leader, Eric Martorano, former General Manager of US Partner Sales at Microsoft®, as our new head of global sales and Bob Tirva as CFO, formerly of Dropbox®.
Topping 720+ employees worldwide, we’ve built a core technology platform, HostPilot®, with 30+ integrated Office in the Cloud™ applications – all with the aim of building our business around the needs of the channel.
- We’ve built a brand new division focused on cloud and mobile security;
- made further investments into proprietary technologies such as SecuriSync®, the first affordable 2-in-1 backup and file sharing solution comprehensive enough for businesses of all sizes; HostPilot™ control panel and cloud management platform, Advanced Email Security (AES) and a wide range other security products; and VoIP Scout™ network testing tools; and
- completed two acquisitions including Telanetix’s AccessLine brand of voice and unified communication services and SaaSID’s dynamic identity and access management offering.
As you can see, we’ve been very busy. And this new chapter is set to bring even more opportunity.
And what’s MDP’s vision for our future relationship? I asked Zaid Alsikafi, a Managing Director at MDP, for his take:
“We are pleased to partner with Intermedia to build upon the company’s momentum and demonstrated track record of growth in the increasingly critical field of cloud-based communications and productivity solutions. Intermedia is successfully capitalizing upon the global shift to the cloud, and possesses tremendous upside potential to capture further opportunities with its reach, scalability, customer support offerings and enhanced product functionality. We have a long-standing relationship with Mike and look forward to working with him and his management team and applying our expertise with fast-growing technology companies to help take the business to the next level.”
Check out how Wall Street Journal and CRN expect the news to impact the business cloud market.
More about MDP
Madison Dearborn Partners (MDP), based in Chicago, is a leading private equity investment firm in the United States. Since MDP’s formation in 1992, the firm has raised seven funds with aggregate capital of approximately $23 billion and has completed approximately 130 investments. Intermedia will become a portfolio company in MDP’s seventh fund, which recently held a final close on $4.4 billion.
MDP invests in businesses across a broad spectrum of industries, including telecom, media and technology services; financial and transaction services; business and government services; health care; basic industries; and consumer. Notable investments include Asurion, Cbeyond, Fieldglass, Intelsat, Liquid Web, MetroPCS, NextG Networks and QuickPlay Media. For more information, please visit http://www.mdcp.com.
[1] CompTIA 5th Annual State of the Channel, October 2015.
