Colorado saw two big acquisitions this week – both in the telecomm (which – in my universe – includes what used to be called cable) sector.
On Friday, Time Warner Telecom announced that it acquired Xspedius Communications for $531.5 million. Colorado VC Meritage was the first round investor in Xspedius and will get a nice return from this deal when it closes. Congrats to my friends at Meritage.
Also – on Friday – we were reminded that the sale of Adelphia’s assets have been finalized. Adelphia officially goes away on Monday, with some of it going to Comcast and some going to Time Warner. This has been a massively non-trivial exercise for the turn around team lead by Bill Schleyer and Ron Cooper (previously head of AT&T Broadband until it merged with Comcast in 2002) – I’m betting there are a lot of people that are going to take at least a week off. Congrats Ron and crew for salvaging this mess.
While it’s hard to categorize Liberty Media as a telecom company, it most definitely is a Colorado technology / Internet / media company. Liberty Media also bought up a company last week, announcing that they’d acquired BuySeasons, which calls itself the largest online custome retailer.
As usual, Silicon Valley and most of the tech blogosphere paid little attention as this was overshadowed by the massive acquisition of Mercury Interactive by Hewlett Packard for $4.5 billion. Ironically, Mercury has a nice presence in Boulder as a result of their acquisition of Freshwater Software in 2001 for $147 million. I hope my friends at Mercury are enjoying the nice increase in the value of their stock options – hopefully they were all granted at appropriate prices.
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