GTT to Buy Interoute for $2.3B

GTT Communications, this week, announced plans to buy Interoute for $2.3 billion in cash. The deal will give GTT 72,000 kilometers of fiber in Europe, data centers, and collocation assets.

GTT President and CEO Rick Calder (News - Alert) said the deal: “creates a disruptive market leader.” He added the acquisition will help it address the demand for distributed cloud networking in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere. And he said the integration will be completed within three to four quarters of the deal’s close.

The new fiber assets include more than 400 points of presence and cover 24 metro areas and 29 countries. The deal also includes 15 data centers, 17 virtual data centers, and 51 collocation facilities. And it strengthens GTT’s SD-WAN capabilities.

Interoute is a London-based company with a market value of more than $2 billion. And late year, its annual revenue was $884 million.

GTT, based out of McLean, Virginia, sells cloud networking services including optical transport, WAN, internet, managed services, and voice and video offerings, to multinational organizations. This company was formed more than a decade ago via the merger Global Internetworking out of Washington, D.C., and European Telecom and Technology out of London.

It was started by H. Brian Thompson, who today serves as GTT’s executive chairman of the board. He was an executive vice president of MCI, which WorldCom bought in 1998 for $37 billion. Then, he founded LCI International, which he later sold to Qwest for $4.4 billion.

GTT’s planned acquisition of Interoute is just the company’s latest purchase. As this company has been, on what RAD-INFO’s Peter Radizeski called, “an acquisition tear.” In June of 2017 GTT announced its Giglinx, Global Capacity (News - Alert), and Perseus acquisitions.

And just last month, GTT announced the acquisition of Custom Connect, a business connectivity provider out of Amsterdam. In October, GTT bought Transbeam (News - Alert) for $28 million in cash. That company offered managed data and voice services.