Servers Australia snaps up assets of once-defunct RackCentral

Servers Australia continues its acquisition spree by acquiring the assets of colocation, hosting and virtual server provider RackCentral from New Zealand telco Vibe Communications.

This would be the third acquisition within four months for Central Coast, NSW-based Servers Australia.

Chief executive Jared Hirst confirmed the acquisition to CRN, and said his company was aiming to complete the deal towards the end of this year.

Customers will migrate from Vibe to Servers Australia once the deal is complete, according to Hirst.

“RackCentral is a great fit for Servers Australia,” Hirst told CRN. “We saw an opportunity to take the company off of Vibe’s hands and focus on our respective core businesses.”

He expects that the acquisition will add “a few million dollars” per year in revenue, and its NextDC presence in Melbourne will be “significantly larger”. Servers Australia is also a major customer of Equinix and a member of its Cloud Exchange program.

“We have had a tremendous year of growth in the Australasian market which presents an exciting challenge in prioritising opportunities," Vibe Group chief executive Karl Rosnell said.

"For this reason, we have decided the RackCentral colocation services are better placed with a specialist colocation provider.”

“We are pleased to have worked with Servers Australia on this and are confident the RackCentral customers will be well served by this growing Australian hosting company”.

Melbourne-based RackCentral went into liquidation in 2014, with major creditor Vocus Communications claiming almost $1.5 million in debt.

Vibe Communications then announced the acquisition of RackCentral in 2015, with chief executive Shaun McGuane taking the role of chief infrastructure officer for both Vibe and RackCentral.

It is unclear exactly what Vibe acquired – though it is understood to have been a company called RackCentral Services, which was established as a separate entity one month before RackCentral appointed liquidators.

Last year the company also acquired Dedicated Servers, Indigo and Syncom in a deal “worth millions,” in an effort to become Australia’s top dedicated hosting provider.