Carlyle Group Unloads Cloud Access Provider Expereo to Paris-Based Firm

Private equity firm Apax Partners announced that it is poised to buy Expereo, a global managed internet and cloud access provider based in the Netherlands, from investment giant The Carlyle Group.

Expereo has more than doubled earnings in the four years since it was purchased by Carlyle Group in 2014, and CEO Irwin Fouwels expects this to accelerate under the new owners. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed and the deal remains subject to legal and regulatory approvals.

’With Apax Partners, we have a new partner who will continue to invest in Expereo’s strategic growth and development, through enhancement of our product portfolio, complementary acquisitions, and delivering ever higher standards of excellence in our global go-to-market execution and service,’ Fouwels said in a statement.

Expereo, one of the world’s largest managed internet network and cloud connectivity solutions providers, has more than 11,500 enterprise and government sites under management across over 190 countries. The company reported revenue of $107 million in fiscal 2017.

An Expereo company spokesman told CRN that many businesses are adding more connectivity and bandwidth, which will continue to drive Expereo’s growth. The spokesman said Expereo also provides clients with SD-WAN managed services and support from multiple vendors.

’What we see more and more is that enterprises around the world are embracing, they’re including more internet connectivity in their network,’ the spokesman said. ’Our value is that we can provide that. We’re currently connecting companies across about 190 countries. We have a huge amount of suppliers, we have about 3,000 suppliers that we manage across the world. Through them we provide the connectivity. ’

It is known for providing optimized internet services to keep clients linked world wide, including places with marginal IT infrastructure, using two of the company’s major products: XCA Edge and XCA Accelerated Cloud Access, the spokesman said.

’So if you have a U.S. company and they have an office in Singapore,’ Expereo told CRN. ’They might be trying to use Office 365 from a data center in the US. The experience isn’t always going to be great. So we have hubs that run our XCA platform that optimize that connection, so it's fast and employees are as productive as possible.’

Thomas de Villeneuve, a partner at Paris-based Apax said they are looking forward to working with Fouwels and the team that he’s assembled.

’Expereo meets all the criteria we look for when investing: a strong management team with a clear strategic vision and the ability to execute it, highly differentiated and innovative value propositions and technologies and leading positions in the very attractive cloud services and software defined networking global markets,’ he said in a statement. ’Our investment also materializes our strong will to invest in Dutch leading companies.’