Carousel Industries has has signed a letter of intent to acquire OmniPresence, a Marlborough, Mass.-based solution provider, audio/visual integrator and video and collaboration specialist. It's the latest in a string of acquisitions, pending or closed, for M&A-hungry Carousel, which intends to keep branching out by augmenting its organic growth with strategic buys.
Carousel, ranked No. 202 on the 2010 VAR500 list and based in Exeter, R.I., earlier this month signed a letter of intent to acquire Juma Technology, which, like Carousel, is an East Coast Avaya powerhouse.
The pickup of OmniPresence, with whom Carousel entered into a strategic partnership last year, marks Carousel's sixth acquisition in the past two years.
OmniPresence carries Cisco/Tandberg, LifeSize Communications, Polycom, Vidyo, Sony and Radvision, among others, and will add to Carousel's already-substantial videoconferencing, telepresence and video collaboration practice. Nine-year-old OmniPresence's customer base is about 2,500 end users, according to Carousel.
"We're just seeing a ton of traction. For our customers, when we're doing core telephony type solutions, video comes up quite a bit," said James Marsh, Carousel's senior vice president, in a discussion with CRN. "These are good guys and they understand the business."
Once the acquisition is completed, OmniPresence will become the core of Carousel's newly formed Visual Communications and Collaboration Group, which will be led by current OmniPresence CTO and co-founder Tim Hill.
According to Carousel, it will maintain OmniPresence's Marlborough, Mass.-based office and intends to retain all of OmniPresence's employees. Tom Wing, OmniPresence's co-founder, president and CEO, will be a liaison between Carousel's executive team and its high-profile accounts and oversee the build-up of Carousel's content recording and content streaming services and solutions.
