SherWeb Buys OrcsWeb to Jumpstart Public Cloud Products
Canadian cloud services provider SherWeb has entered into a deal to acquire North Carolina based managed hosting provider OrcsWeb in a deal that is expected to bolster SherWeb’s public cloud endeavors into the United States. The amount of the sale was not disclosed but we do know that the deal closed on July 22nd. By buying out OrcsWeb, Sherweb is expected to pivot into the IaaS market. In an interview with CRN, Cloud Product Manager of SherWeb Guillaume Boisvert mentions, “For 2014, introducing our own public cloud will be our main focus for both retail and our channel.”
The acquisition has birthed a new product called the SherWeb Performance Cloud. SherWeb’s secret sauce is that they plan on beating out other IaaS providers by offering cloud architecture that is focused on performance. SherWeb mentions they have plans to implement redundant fabric, name brand enterprise-quality hardware and SSD drives in each of their servers.
Guillaume Boisvert went on to say that “The idea for us is to go all out and provide top-of-the-line performance and really deliver that to our customers and to our partners. We tell our customers that our virtual servers will work as well as their dedicated servers. They really wanted us to offer that managed cloud, so it was really one of the drivers of the acquisition, so we could offer the right products for our channel.”
SherWeb started its business in 1998 and in the mid 2000s, the company transformed into an early adopter of Microsoft managed cloud services. Although the company is based in Montreal, SherWeb reports that over 75% of its revenue comes from the US market currently. OrcsWeb is based in Charlotte, North Carolina and the acquisition means that SherWeb will bring OrcsWeb’s private datacenter online with SherWeb’s three other existing datacenters. Boisvert also mentioned the acquisition of OrcsWeb would continue to “jumpstart our own IaaS service offering.”
