Interland Purchases Dialtone, Says More Acquisitions Likely

📅 May 7, 2002 - Interland Inc. (Interland.com 👉 Total Reviews: 2
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The acquisition is Interland's fourth in the past six months. Since October 2001, the company has also purchased the shared and retail Web hosting business of Interliant, the shared and dedicated Web hosting accounts of AT&T that were related to small businesses, and Missouri-based hosting firm CommuniTech.Net.
Interland also announced that its recent acquisitions have moved the company in to a market leadership position both in the areas of total customers and managed dedicated hosting. The company now has approximately 220,000 recurring revenue Web hosting customer accounts, and 400,000 paid hosted Web sites. Interland also now has a total of 7,000 dedicated servers under management.
Interland's purchase of Dialtone differs from some of its other acquisitions in that the company said it purchased the entire company, including its assets and staff, as opposed to simply buying customer accounts. The company said that Alvaro Albarracin, Dialtone founder and CEO, has accepted an executive position with Interland, and is expected to continue to run the company's Fort Lauderdale operation. Dialtone Internet employs approximately 60 people and hosts more than 2,600 servers for customers in 80 countries.
Joel Kocher, CEO of Interland, said in an interview Tuesday that Dialtone is "extremely capable" in the dedicated Web hosting space, and that Interland intends to use that to its advantage. "We want to use them as a launching platform to increase our focus on the dedicated market," he said. "We believe the dedicated market is growing very rapidly." Kocher said the Dialtone brand name would be retained "for some time," and might eventually become an Interland product line name. "For now, we're just trying to support what they're doing and invest a little heavier and try to leverage what they have," he said.
Kocher also said Interland's focus would continue to be on the North American Web hosting market, and that a concentrated effort on penetrating international markets was still a year away. As a result, Kocher said the company would not retain Dialtone's London and Mexico City data centers. "We are not going to, at this time, continue their focus in those areas," he said. "We probably will sell those off or something of that sort."
Although the company has made a number of significant acquisitions over the past few months, Kocher also said Interland continues to look at additional acquisitions, with additional purchases likely in the future. "We're just getting started," he said.