04/01/2008

mindSHIFT Technologies has acquired Burlington, MA-based Collaboration Online, Limited Company, a privately owned provider of SaaS-based collaboration tools.

ebizQ received the following:

"Collaboration Online dramatically expands our market reach," said mindSHIFT Chairman and CEO Paul Chisholm. "We are now able to provide small and mid-size businesses with additional enterprise-class messaging and collaboration tools which will assist them in increasing growth and corporate productivity. It also enables us to expand our geographic reach considerably."

"We are delighted to join forces with mindSHIFT, an East Coast powerhouse of managed IT and VoIP services," said Ravi Agarwal, CEO of Collaboration Online. "Their considerable resources will enable us to more quickly become the market leader in hosted services, reach more customers, and offer additional industry-leading hosted software services."

Founded in 2002, Collaboration Online provides hosted Microsoft Exchange Server, Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM to partners and small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) under multiple brands.

The company also markets its hosted SaaS offering as a private label service through a strong reseller channel. These resellers are able to market the company's hosted services under their own brands using the company's state-of the-art Private Label Application Delivery (PLAD) platform. The PLAD platform enables channel partners to resell the services as part of their own product offering, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in development and support costs.

The acquisition provides mindSHIFT with strategic value in three areas:

1. a high growth opportunity in the SMB market to provide a larger breadth of industry-leading enterprise-class hosted services

2. an automated and scalable provisioning and support platform that dramatically lowers the costs of customer acquisition and support

3. a successful and mature reseller program