Today Bandwidth announced they are acquiring Voxbone, a company I'm very familiar with from years of working with them in their early stages before becoming PE-backed. I've always admired their foresight, and recall how they always had Bandwidth in their sights, first as a customer, then wearily as a competitor, and even as a possible merger candidate.
The deal makes a lot of sense, as for Bandwidth, as this removes a layer of supplier/co-opitition in North America, while expanding their footprint globally. The obvious layer it removes is the battle for the supply for telephone numbers, a service both have had for years, but which is not the real key to this deal. The key here though is Voxbone's very well developed cloud network overlay in Europe and how it connects to the rest of the world. Those interconnections are crucial, and becoming more so as apps that use both Bandwidth and Voxbone look for efficiency, reliability, and consistency. It immediately expands Bandwidth's footprint and gives them a running start in that part of the world.
By merging the two companies, they also streamline sales and network operations for their customers, many of whom already did business with both brands. This also eliminates the "competitive" aspects and will, for a bit of time, remove the negotiations that would go on between buyers of either of their services. Pricing will be now set by Bandwidth, removing the option of Voxbone offering a better deal--something that is not so good for customers who lack long-term pricing already locked in.
Bandwidth has been rising for years and is a very well run, excellent company to do business with. They stand behind their services and have been steadily building out their CPaaS infrastructure and working on their own IP based solutions. With the Voxbone acquisition, they get the IP that Voxbone has, some of which, like Bandwidth, is based upon FreeSwitch, but other parts are not.
The one surprising thing about the deal is the price tag. I would have thought by now that Voxbone would have commanded a higher price, but the additional stock in Bandwidth the seller will receive likely makes that point moot.