Resources from Unified Communications

Birch Finalizes Purchase of Select Primus Assets

By Michael Guta
Contributing Writer

Birch Communications provides voice, cloud, network, IT and mobile services to small, mid-sized, enterprise and wholesale businesses throughout North America. As the company celebrates its 20 years in business, it has been expanding market share into new territories by making key acquisition of telecommunications service providers. The latest purchase is the select assets and customers of Primus Telecommunications (News - Alert) Canada Inc. and its affiliates, Primus.

Birch announced in March of 2016 it would be buying these assets. At that time, Christopher Ramsey, Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer at Birch, said, "Our ability to attract new customers, particularly enterprise customers, has just grown exponentially. We look forward to leveraging our growth on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border."

According to Birch, this is its first international asset expansion and it will now have access to the more than 250,000 businesses and consumers throughout Canada that are part of Primus, Canada's largest independent, full-service telecommunications and cloud service provider.

In addition to its customers in Canada, Primus also has presence in the U.S. providing home VoIP services under the Lingo brand. Because both companies provide complementary product portfolios, such as broadband internet, cloud-hosted PBX (News - Alert), dedicated data access, local phone, long distance and a variety of wholesale solutions, they will be able to give their customers more choices and better price points.

Since 2010, Birch has acquired several companies and expanded its infrastructure across the U.S. This includes the purchase of American Fiber Network, Freedom Communications USA, and CloseCall America in September of 2010. It went on to buy Acutel of Texas, AstroTel, dpiTeleconnect, DayStar Communications, Covista Communications, Cbeyond (News - Alert) and others.

These acquisitions were in part or whole composed of strategic assets, customers, and infrastructure, which allowed Birch to continue expanding its telecommunication services to more customers.

Vincent Oddo, President and CEO at Birch, said, "Primus is a great strategic fit as we work toward our goal of growing our service footprint to international markets. As a whole, our entire customer base will benefit from Birch's new, larger territory reach and robust product offerings."

Birch is growing at a robust rate, and most of this growth is made through the key acquisitions the company has made throughout the years. However, unlike some companies that seem to have a difficulty in fully integrating their solution with the business they purchase, Birch seems to have the right recipe to make it work. The company continues to deliver enterprise-grade offerings to businesses of all sizes along with award winning customer service as it continues to grow.