Fusion Becomes Cloud Services Powerhouse with Close of Birch Acquisition

**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting merger and acquisition news from March.**

Cloud services provider Fusion has completed its acquisition of Birch Communications‘ cloud and business-services business, including its customers, operations and infrastructure, in a transaction valued at $600 million.

The deal excludes Birch’s legacy consumer and single-line business customers, which Fusion says have lower profitability and average revenue per customer (ARPU), and higher churn rates. The combination is expected to create one of the largest cloud services providers in North America, with more than 150,000 business customers and a 100-percent IP-based network, including 30 data centers, 31,000 fiber route-miles of network, and metro fiber assets in 11 major markets.

Birch partners will have a broader cloud services portfolio to sell to complement existing products and services, most notably SD-WAN.

“Today marks the beginning of an exciting new era for Fusion, as we now move forward to realize the tremendous potential of the combined company,” said Matthew Rosen, Fusion’s chairman and CEO. “In bringing the two businesses together, we have created a market-leading cloud services company that is positioned for further growth, both organically and through additional strategic acquisitions. We are confident that Fusion can create significant, long-term value for shareholders by extending our proven strategy as the single source for the cloud across our greatly expanded platform and customer base, and leveraging our substantially greater scale and resources.”

When announcing the acquisition last summer, Fusion said the acquisition will allow the company to offer more competitive pricing in key markets and broaden its advanced and integrated single-source cloud offerings for its channel partners.