Webmail.us announced yesterday that they were acquired by Rackspace. Webmail.us is a paid email service that targets small-medium businesses. They currently have 72,000 businesses and 600,000 users. A year ago, they had only 23,000 businesses using their service, so they have been growing at a great rate. This growth rate earned them position #217 on the Inc 500 list of fastest growing privately held companies in America.
The acquisition is a smart move by Racksapce. Rackspace is a well-known hosting company and considered a leader in their industry. They were providing all the backend infrastructure for Webmail.us services. Rackspace was also the biggest reseller of Webmail.us. Now Rackspace can use their internal hardware and bandwidth to lower the operating costs and retain 100% of the revenue from customers of the email services. Webmail.us will continue to operate it from their Blacksburg, Virginia offices and the management team will stay intact.
It has been a good year for email companies. Zimbra was acquired last month for $350 million by Yahoo and now this undisclosed acquisition of Webmail.us. One thing that impressed me about Webmail.us was the attitude of the management team. While they acknowledge the buyout was not on the same level as Zimbra, they are completely happy to continue to run and develop their business. They seem to have an attitude of wanting to run a business instead of making tons of money. I think that is a pretty great thing to hear in this crazy age of high dollar acquisitions. While a large sum of money is nice, there is something completely satisfying in running a successful company.
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