Intermedia CEO Says Madison Dearborn Acquisition Won't Change Partner Focus

Chicago-based private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners has acquired cloud services provider Intermedia from Oak Hill Capital Partners this week.

Oak Hill acquired Intermedia back in 2011 and since then Intermedia CEO Michael Gold said that the company has doubled down in its partner area, growing its portfolio of services to more than 30 different business applications. 

“We were firm believers that the VARs and MSPs as the trusted advisors to the majority of businesses that were really the perfect channel for this transformation to the cloud,” Gold said in an interview with Talkin’ Cloud. 

“We have moved more of our business through partners; the majority of what we sell is coming through our partner channel, not direct,” he said. 

According to Gold, Madison Dearborn has a similar “MO to Oak Hill” in regards to backing management teams – which recently added new CFO Bob Tirva​ and senior vice president of worldwide sales Eric Martorano – and supporting strategy. He expects Intermedia and its partners to benefit from additional capital for acquisitions in order to boost its portfolio as well. 

Gold said that the acquisition doesn’t change anything for partners, aside from eventually having more services to choose from. “Perhaps with this change and the fresh capital we’ll do some acquisitions, so that would expand the services we offer,” he said. 

“We planned before and we plan now to continue to invest heavily in our partner channel, in our products, in our support, and in our operations to do that.”

In terms of existing services that are doing well for Intermedia, Gold said that email continues to be important, particularly with Office 365. 

“Voice services continue to be important and are becoming an increasingly larger part of our company. In the voice area we have two primary products, one is our cloud PBX product, competes with the likes of RingCentral and 8×8,” he said. “Another is a SIP trunking product which provides a VoIP to customers who have their own on-premise PBXs or want to take a traditional PBX product to the cloud.”

In addition, Gold says its SecuriSync backup and file sharing platform is another area of growth. 

“We are one of the largest security vendors that no one really thinks of as a security vendor,” Gold says. “Each and every one of our customers is getting cloud security applications from us and we recently launched a new division to expand this set of products that we offer.”