The headline is goofy. I know. But another acquisition happened. Windstream grabbed some hosting.

We saw Cbeyond's purchase of both Aretta Communications and MaximumASP for what appears to be 3.5x anual revenue today. (Cbeyond will pay at most $40M for almost $12M in revenue).

We saw Dell and HP bid crazy for 3PAR, which is understandable since as Cloud services increase box sales should decline. Intel probably saw that PC and server sales peaked a while ago; hence, the McAfee purchase. Can you say MRC instead of one-time payment?

There is talk about the RBOC's getting into Cloud services. VZ handles ERP for a few big businesses and government agencies. Ma Bell is looking at cloud-based healthcare apps. Broadsoft when CAAS with its BroadCloud. But how do Tier 2 and 3 telcos and MSO's get into the Cloud game - both quickly and efficiently? And let's not forget that there needs to be a certain level of control for the service provider. There needs to be transparency for provisioning and technical support as well as billing.

IBM is rolling out an EZ-Cloud platform for telcos. Maybe this is an answer besides acquisitions. Although with an acquiistion, you get revenue, customers and faster go-to-market. However, most acquisitions do not go well and do not realize half the "synergies" proclaimed.

So Windstream went the buy route and purchased Raleigh-based Hosting Solutions, Inc for -$130M - $310M cash. "Hosted Solutions is a regional data center and managed hosting provider focused on enterprise-class Infrastructure as a Service solutions (managed hosting, managed services, colocation, cloud computing and bandwidth) for small and medium-sized business customers as well as large enterprises..... The company serves more than 600 customers and has approximately 125 employees. It was acquired by PE firm ABRY in 2008 fro $140 million."[PR]