EarthLink Hits Acquisition Trail, Buys Boston Retail Partners

July 14th, 2016 by · 5 Comments

After a year of retrenching and refocusing on its core businesses, EarthLink has returned to the M&A arena with a small summer deal.  The service provider has bought Boston Retail Partners, a management consulting firm that specializes in the retail vertical.

The deal adds to EarthLink’s ability to serve the enterprise marketplace by adding more technology strategy and consulting expertise to its portfolio.  BRP has been active in helping retailers to upgrade from legacy connectivity and technology toward what is being called ‘unified commerce’ by some.   It’s a sector that EarthLink has long had a presence in, and by buying BRP they hope to make further inroads.

Earlier this year, EarthLink sold off much of its IT services assets to Synoptek. With the purchase of BRP we can see that they are being quite specific in what services they’d like to specialize in, and they are looking beyond the normal bounds of a service provider and perhaps further into the domain of the systems integrator.  BRP has 40 employees and is based in Boston.

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Categories: CLEC · Managed Services · Mergers and Acquisitions

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5 Comments So Far


  • Anonymous says:

    This acquisition stupefies me. ELNK isn’t a consulting firm. They are broken telecom provider who has failed to integrate their own IT systems from a B/OSS perspective and now they want people to believe they are going to provide consulting? seriously?

    When you are done laughing, think about this. What has this CEO really done? He hires a marketing person who has no formal experience in the telecom space and then eventually has to let her go. Then he hires a former friend from Visa to be managed services leader and IT owner while simultaneously laying off his former Chief Sales guy. Then he brings in a product guy who apparently no longer has product. then he hires a new IT guy who now has product.

    Sounds like the board is failing. What a disaster. This purchase is nothing more than lipstick on a pig hoping someone sees some value in an otherwise irrelevant business.

    • Anonymous says:

      “What has this CEO really done? ”
      well, he has managed to get paid…..
      does that count?

      • No doubt says:

        Don’t forget that he got some a$$ to from his stock of girlfriends that he has / had at ELNK. In fact i think a few have been shown the door with very nice packages to help their bums that are overworked by joe a nice soft landing.

  • Rolla Huff says:

    When I retired, I was told that Joe Eazor was the man for the Job, but he has turned a great company into a company that sells fractional t-1’s, and when sober, is lost in the job. Maybe picking up the bottle again will help bring the T1 sales back

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