On December 16, 2013, Littlejohn & Co., LLC, a private investment firm based in Greenwich, CT, announced the acquisition of Hostway Corp. a leading provider of hosted information technology solutions to over 500,000 small and medium-size businesses and enterprise customers. Littlejohn will serve as an active shareholder and board of directors in support of the Company's plan to capitalize on the tremendous demand for hosted IT solutions. [via Hostway pr]. Hostway announced a new CEO today, Robert Boles.

Microsoft hired from within for its new CEO, picking Satya Nadella. Will he be able to get Microsoft innovating again and find some way to win the mobile war? Or will Microsoft become like HP with a revolving door of useless CEO's?

UC shop, Arkadin acquired Implement.com just as Arkadin is acquired by NTT.

I do have to make a retraction here about this post: MegaPath contacted me to say that the merger with Cbeyond was a rumor. Their CEO was unable to attend ITEXPO due to town hall meetings in the Northwest. So maybe that rumor of the MegaPath-Cbeyond merger isn't true. Although I won't be shocked if I hear the announcement in 2 months. MegaPath would have to get a lot of financing to buy CBEY.

File Sharing

PanTerra has pivoted into the file sharing/cloud storage space with a freemium file sharing service with 2GB of space called SmartBox. Agents spread the word and if someone they referred ever signs up for a paid service, they get a commission. The file sharing comes with the UC service integrated so that users can IM and talk to other users. Forbes had a great headline: Because There's Not Nearly Enough Choice Among File Sync Vendors - Panterra Adds Unified Communications To The Mix.

In this review of YouSendIt, a cloud company can learn a thing or two about customer service. On the other hand, $300 per year doesn't really cover hardware and network costs for a file service passing 1 GB files. It has to scale to a million users.