This morning we announced a deal to be acquired by Internap Network Services Corp., a public company out of Atlanta (internap.josh.ux.voxel.net). For those of you that follow the Internet Infrastructure space, the company will be familiar. For those that don’t, Internap roots go way back to the dot.com era where the company made its mark by providing a “route optimized” IP product that eliminated the congestion and latency issues that plagued the early Internet. In my tenure with Eureka Networks we were a customer of Internap for many years and my memories of working with them are positive both from a product and support perspective. Since that time Internap added content delivery via the acquisition of Vitalstream in 2006 and over the last few years has made a huge push into collocation and managed IT infrastructure.
Our coming together was the product of natural conversations that occur among executives in the industry and we both quickly realized that our business approach and product platform mix could be a powerful combination together. One, we are both huge believers in the power of software to transform infrastructure solutions. Internap has built a 50+ person team of software engineers over the last two years and was the first player to come out with an enterprise ready object storage product based on Openstack. At Voxel, our founder Raj has always approached hosting “from the software side” and we have been working heavily with Openstack as the future “plumbing” to our VoxSTRUCTURE platform. The commitment to software and how software can transform our hosting solutions is there on both sides. Two, both companies have focused on delivering high-end, mission critical, scalable Internet Infrastructure solutions. This focus on performance and the customer experience are central to both organizations. Lastly, we felt the executive team at Internap shared our values and beliefs about how to do business and the interaction with the teams has been extremely positive so early in the game.
We believe our product mix and customer mix are complimentary and result in a 1+1=3 type of scenario. Our shared global presence and customer base is also complimentary. It is for all these reasons that we decided to team up with Internap. We felt this type of deal could accelerate our vision to build the best Internet Infrastructure platform in the world. We are excited about the potential of the combined company and believe it will benefit our employees, customers and business partners.
I look forward to sharing with you our progress on the integration over the next few months. Happy New Year!
