About a week ago, the WHIR reported that two investment banks, Warburg Pincus and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, had acquired most of Accel-KKR’s stake in web hosting giant Endurance International Group, in a deal that, according to anonymous Reuters sources, valued the company at about $ 1 billion.
To the hosting industry itself, Endurance is a force of nature – a giant in the SMB space, serving 1.9 million customers, handling 7.7 million domains and operating (approximately) 36 separate hosting brands.
To vendors serving the hosting industry, EIG is one of those big customers – the kind of deal that can distribute a product to millions of users.
To the HostingCon crowd, EIG is the quintessential strategic buyer in the M&A scenario. It’s not an investment bank or a VC firm. It’s the big hosting brand that buys the smaller brands. Most of those 36 brands were acquired at some point.
And within the context of HostingCon, Endurance senior VP of corporate development has been a familiar face, both in sessions of his own, and on M&A panels, where he has offered insight into how hosting acquisitions go down – what the buyer is looking for, essentially.
So how does the acquisition impact the HostingCon crowd?
It’s pretty safe to assume that it will be more or less business as usual for Endurance, following the deal. Warburg Pincus and Goldman Sachs are investors, and Endurance is an investment. There’s no parent company. It doesn’t get rolled into something bigger. And for Endurance, business as usual means more acquisitions (with maybe a little more money to throw around).
For the HostingCon program, well, maybe it means this time Bardenheier has a little more experience on the other side of the M&A table that he can share.
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