SherWeb Jumps Into IaaS Space with OrcsWeb Acquisition

Cloud services provider SherWeb is getting into the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) business through the acquisition of managed hosting provider OrcsWeb. This represents SherWeb’s third acquisition in three years and its first in the IaaS cloud market segment.

OrcsWeb will operate as a subsidiary of SherWeb. The organization provides shared, cloud and dedicated server hosting services and currently has four data center locations in Charlotte, North Carolina. The acquisition of OrcsWeb accelerates SherWeb’s entry into the IaaS market, positioning it as a new competitor in the growing cloud infrastructure services space.

“SherWeb’s expansion into IaaS will enable us to offer customers and channel partners more value and choice from the cloud, without having to invest in or maintain complex infrastructure themselves,” said Matthew Cassar, co-founder and president of SherWeb, in a prepared statment. “OrcsWeb naturally complements our overall business strategy because their depth of expertise in managed Windows hosting is one of several areas of diversification that will be critical to cloud services providers in the near future.”

Earlier this year, SherWeb greatly expanded its reach into the cloud services arena, primarily as a Microsoft partner. Following the acquisition of Thoughtbus last November, SherWeb launched SkyOffice 2013 in May as a competing offering to Microsoft‘s popular Office 365 cloud-based office productivity suite of services.

With the OrcsWeb acquisition, SherWeb is extending itself beyond software-as-a-service (SaaS), which could provide an increase in exposure among not only its customers, but also its value-added reseller (VAR) channel that it currently sells SkyOffice through.

Since OrcsWeb will be run as a separate entity, though, it’s unknown how its IaaS offerings will play into the SherWeb channel, but it wouldn’t take much of a stretch to enable its existing partners with the OrcsWeb cloud services.