PHNS Buys AmeriVault To Expand Storage Service Offerings

AmeriVault, of Waltham, Mass., which provides online data protection and recovery, backups, and e-mail archiving and recovery services to customers, was acquired by PHNS, a Dallas-based provider of IT services for hospitals, other healthcare providers, and other businesses.

AmeriVault will be a subsidiary of PHNS, and its services will be paired with those of another PHNS subsidiary, NTG, said Scott Bush, director of marketing at AmeriVault.

NTG, formerly known as Network Technology Group before its acquisition by PHNS about a year ago, provides data center, business continuity, and disaster recovery services, including application hosting, co-location and manage services, data backup, and data vaulting.

The acquisition is part of a move by PHNS to expand from its previous exclusive focus on healthcare services to providing a wide range of IT services to general business users, Bush said.

"PHNS wants to expand their reach, so they acquired us," Bush said. "But PHNS also wants to do more with technology in general, so we are not focusing on healthcare. We work with any industry. We do well in financial, legal, and healthcare industries, but we're agnostic."

The acquisition is not expected to change how AmeriVault works with its customers and its channel partners, and the company is still planning to expand its channel reach, Bush said. "The only difference is, we'll have the backing of a larger organization," he said. "PHNS wants us to grow. They're not looking to meddle in our business. It's a nice situation where we can grow without someone trying to interfere."

AmeriVault currently hosts its storage services in a co-lo data center in Waltham, Mass, and replicates data to another in Chicago, Bush said. "NTG brings three data centers to the party," he said. "We need to look and see if we can now offer different services."

AmeriVault has seen at least double-digit growth every year since its founding in 1998, and has been profitable since 2004, Bush said.

Both PHNS and AmeriVault are privately-owned companies, and declined to discuss terms of the acquisition.