Xand Merges with Access Northeast update from April 2012

xand-DataCenter

A look inside the Xand data center in Westchester County, New York. Xand is merging with Access Northeast to form a multi-state colocation and cloud hosting provider (Photo: Xand).

Private equity firm ABRY Partners is staying busy in the data center sector, bringing together Xand and Access Northeast to form one of the largest privately held data center companies in the Northeast. The merger of Xand and Access Northeast creates a company serving nearly 1,000 customers from facilities in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Xand is a data center service provider based in Westchester County, New York that was acquired by ABRY Partners in October of 2011. ABRY Partners, a Boston, Mass. private equity investment firm, has made several significant investments in the data center and communications space.

"We believe the combination of Xand and Access Northeast creates an unrivaled regional service platform company intently focused upon the data center triple play - colocation, cloud and managed services," said Brian St. Jean of ABRY Partners. "We look forward to backing the newly formed company with additional resources for expansion and acquisitions."

Access Northeast is one of the largest privately held data center managed services providers in New England. It offers services including colocation, enterprise hosting, disaster recovery and its cloud computing offering, Parthenon Cloud.

Regional DR Offerings

The merged company will be able to offer regional enterprises a multiple data center service across Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York for better implementation of their strategic business continuity and disaster recovery plans.

"A single customer-centric service provider implementing end-to-end replication, backup and recovery solutions is a very powerful proposition," said Rob Stephenson, Access Northeast's CEO. "Our team is very excited for the Xand merger and is bullish on the prospect of jointly delivering Internet Infrastructure services to businesses of all sizes."

Stephenson will serve as the Chief Marketing Officer and a member of the Board of Directors in the new entity. He joins CFO Bob DeSantis and David Struwas, CEO of Xand, to form the core of the new company's management team. Eric Kagan, Access Northeast's current CTO, will also remain with the company in a technical role and as a Board Observer.

"Xand and Access Northeast both share a strong commitment to providing excellent service and innovative solutions to our customers," said Struwas. "The synergies between our firms will only serve to reinforce this message to the northeast marketplace."