Between Comcast and Amazon: NewSpring to take X5 national (Update)
Hirsch (Transcend) and Forrest (ACG) head team
(Updated, with comments from NewSpring's Skip Maner in Paragraph 3): NewSpring Capital, Radnor, says today it acquired Seattle-based X5 Solutions, in the first of a series of deals designed to build a national network of voice, data, and Internet services for business clients. X5 offers SIP (Sessions International Protocol) trunking to combine multiple cloud-based information streams in a single user interface.
NewSpring has hired the team of Greg Forrest and Rick Hirsh to run X5, add products and build a national network. Hirsch previously headed Transcend United Technologies, a Wayne telecom firm sold to Dallas-based ACG Networks, where Forrest worked, in 2013. NewSpring has invested more than $1 billion in clients' money, mostly in East Coast tech companies, through a team headed by founder Michael DiPiano.
NewSpring general partner Skip Maner, who will work closely with X5, adds this: "Connectivity and communications for middle market clients are increasingly complex. Further, customers in the middle market don't have great providers to help them solve these problems. Amazon and Comcast and other providers service the small end of the market. Verizon, L3, CenturyLink and others serve the higher end of the market. The middle market (which we define as companies with 25-2500 communications end points) has been abandoned. X5 is a solutions provider that provides complex service solutions to customers so they can ensure that their connectivity needs (voice, data, cloud) are met -- because downtime is not an option.""
Forrest called X5 "a central first step" in NewSpring's strategy to buy regional cloud-based telecom providers "in a number of NFL-type cities and create a larger geographic carrier footprint to provide expanded communications, cloud and managed servcies." He said X5 will add new "Unified Communications" products for retail and wholesale firms and government agencies later this year. Richard Reynolds, X5's previous CEO, is leaving the company.