Interoute Buys Into Telepresence, Bolsters Cloud Offerings

Pan-European network operator Interoute (news) did a little cloudy M&A yesterday, announcing the acquisition of Visual Conference Group.  VCG offers managed video conferencing and telepresence services from its home turf in Scandanavia, having been founded by former Tandberg personnel back in 2002.  Interoute’s plan is obviously to take that product and expand it to rest of Europe by leveraging all that fiber they operate.  Interoute has always viewed itself as a technology company rather than a telecom, and thus appears rather comfortable with the arrival of the cloud computing revolution.  But of course telepresence is a bit of a special case, and buying their way into that business seems like a smart way to get started.  The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In looking around Interoute’s website, I also noticed they have posted a new fiber-level map of their full European assets, post-KPN deal.  The map of combined assets they offered up at that time was less detailed, s0 I cribbed out a piece of the new one – shown below.

I have also added the new (complete) map link to my European maps page, to which I recently also added a map for German regional provider envia Tel.

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Categories: Internet Backbones · Mergers and Acquisitions · telepresence · Video