Sangoma Technologies Corporation, a provider of cloud-based communications as a service solution, announced it has acquired NetFortris Corporation for a reported $80 million. This acquisition accelerates Sangoma into the upper echelon of SaaS communications providers and extends its suite of cloud services with MSP capabilities to deliver more ‘one-stop shopping’ for customers.
NetFortris provides UCaaS and cloud-based, fully managed MSP (managed service provider) solutions. It has approximately 250 employees and four primary offices in Dallas, Los Angeles, Manila and Seattle. In addition to NetFortris’ UCaaS offering, its MSP product line delivers mission-critical communications services that customers need to complement their ‘as a service’ applications, such as managed network security, managed SD-WAN, managed network access, monitoring, etc.
Pursuant to the definitive stock purchase agreement dated March 28, Sangoma provides $68 million in upfront, fixed considerations and up to $12 million in an “earn-out” contingent consideration.
“A critical part of our existing strategy, and of our competitive differentiation, involves providing customers with the widest set of cloud communications services in our industry, avoiding the need for them to buy five different services from five different vendors,” said Bill Wignall, president and CEO of Sangoma. “The acquisition of NetFortris further extends that strategy in such a perfectly natural manner. Not only can customers already get from Sangoma all the ‘aaS’ products they use today, but now they will also be able to obtain all the other cloud-based MSP services they know they need, such as managed network security, managed access, and managed SD-WAN. This truly is ‘one-stop shopping’ for our customers, and it taps into that very important new trend that so many of us in the industry see starting to emerge. I am most excited about this acquisition, our eleventh in 11 years because it demonstrates our innovative, unique, forward-looking vision and it continues to push Sangoma ahead in the market, further differentiating us from the competition.”
There is growing awareness that customers prefer to get more of their communications services from one vendor. Not only over-the-top “aaS” cloud communication apps (UCaaS, CCaaS, TaaS, VMaaS, CPaaS, Collaboration, etc.), but also the network security/connectivity/redundancy/monitoring/etc. This transaction satisfies that trend in a way that is a natural fit with Sangoma’s existing strategy of offering “one-stop shopping.”
