US IT and communications service provider EarthLink announced an agreement to acquire CenterBeam, a privately held managed services provider for US$22m. The transaction is structured as an asset purchase and is expected to close early in the third quarter of 2013.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, CenterBeam provides remote managed IT services primarily to multi-location mid-sized businesses, and operates a 140-person IT support center providing help desk, desktop technical support and application support services.

EarthLink CEO Rolla Huff said the acquisition would fast-track the company's IT services product development by providing critical scale and complementary products. “CenterBeam's advanced set of products, tools and processes will enable us to quickly bring a robust set of remote managed IT services and collaboration services to market.

“Additionally, CenterBeam's IT support center will provide expertise, scale and redundancy to our existing EarthLink TechCare remote help desk.”

With this acquisition, EarthLink intends to accelerate its product capabilities for hosted collaboration services and unified end-point management services. The company plans to offer CenterBeam's 365+ Enterprise Cloud collaboration service and its hosted voice platform through its existing distribution channels.

EarthLink also plans to integrate CenterBeam's service control portal with its myLink control portal.