WVT gets regulatory nod to acquire Alteva; starts hiring

Warwick Valley Telephone's $17 million acquisition of cloud-based unified communications provider Alteva has gotten the OK to move forward from the New York State Public Service Commission, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities and the New York State Telecommunications Association.

Those approvals mean the 100-year-old telco can integrate its business, USA Datanet, into Alteva, the largest enterprise hosted VoIP provider in the U.S. WVT said it expects the combined UC and hosted applications businesses of the two to bump its consolidated revenues by some 30 percent on an annual basis. The company said the acquisition "significantly strengthens" WVT's cloud communications platform, which includes leading unified communications and hosted applications for small, medium and large enterprise customers.

Philadelphia-based Alteva specializes in cloud-based UC solutions including VoIP phone systems and service, hosted Microsoft Communication Services, fixed mobile convergence and advanced voice applications for the desktop.

In July, when the acquisition was first announced, Duane W. Albro, WVT's president and chief executive, called the deal "an extraordinary acquisition that will significantly contribute to our strength and momentum in the marketplace."

In a statement today, he said: "We have begun transforming our business into a high-growth company that leverages a successful telecommunications legacy in pursuit of building a platform of higher-margin cloud communications services."

Albro said WVT would expand customer service operations in Warwick, retrain and redeploy employees and continue to add to its Warwick workforce to support continued customer growth.

"This reallocation of work is a critical step in alleviating the need to layoff many of WVT's union-represented workforces in our ILEC business because of the decline in local 'landline' telephone subscribers," he said. "At the same time, we have been experiencing continued demand for our unified communications services. We are proud to report that our transformation into a cloud communications company is progressing as planned. The result is that WVT is growing, and we are hiring!"

For more:
- see this release
- see this TH-R story

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