Thursday Roundup: Cogeco, Conterra, Cisco, MEF

Three bits of interesting M&A news from three different corners of the industry, and an update from the MEF:

There was a bit of interesting M&A in the cable MSO world yesterday. Canadian-based Cogeco Communications has announced a deal in which its US subsidiary Atlantic Broadband will acquire all of the Ohio broadband systems of WideOpenWest. The assets pass some 688,000 homes and businesses in and around Cleveland and Columbus, with 196k internet subscribers, 61k video customers, and 35k telephony customers. Revenues for this slice of WoW were $244M in the 12 months ending March 31, with pro forma adjusted EBITDA of $103M including synergies.

Conterra Networks now officially has new owners. Affiliates of APG and Fiera Infrastructure have completed their acquisition of the company, accompanied by participation of the senior management team and buying out Court Square. Conterra operates 13,000 route miles of fiber plus fixed wireless services spanning 21 states, and via the new ownership hope to accelerate their expansion efforts. Some of that may be organic but some may be inorganic, so it could be interesting to see what sort of appetite Conterra has.

Cisco has also completed an M&A, closing on its purchase of Kenna Security. Kenna specializes in risk-based vulnerability management, and its platform will help further flesh out Cisco’s security portfolio, and more specifically its SecureX detection and response capabilities. Financial details of the deal, which was just announced six weeks or so ago, were not provided.

And MEF detailed the recent and ongoing growth of its MEF 3.0 certification efforts yesterday. They now have more than 60 companies worldwide that are offering certified MEF 3.0 Carrier Ethernet and SD-WAN offerings. For SD-WAN that includes service provider giants AT&T, Verizon, Comcast Business, and Windstream as well as major vendors such as Cisco, VMware, Fortinet, and Versa. For CE, Orange Business, Lumen, Verizon and BT are now among 36 certified providers. A certification process for MEF LSO API is in the works, with Sparkle, TIEM dotCom, and UFINET participating in a pilot project.

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Categories: Cable · Ethernet · Mergers and Acquisitions · Metro fiber · SDN · Security