The companies, both private, declined to disclose the financial details of the deal, which was in the works for approximately six months.

In November of 2007, theWHIR covered reports that Fastservers might be considering a sale, but very little industry speculation followed in the time since that report.

Jack Finlayson, CEO of Layered Technologies says there were several major motivations for the deal, from the perspective of both companies. First among those was the geographic expansion.

"Essentially," says Finlayson, "what it does for us - as not a huge company - it helps Layered Technologies expand from Dallas and a very small presence outside the US, to include Chicago and Iowa and Fremont, California."

The deal also plays on the complimentary strengths of the two companies, says Finlayson.

"One thing that Fastservers.net does very well," he says "is they're very good at the customer service and call center support. They have the DEFCON service layers, customers have a choice of what level of service [they receive]. And they have a very effective call center support organization, which will help with Layered Technologies as well."

Layered Technologies, on the other hand, has developed an expertise in grid-based hosting built on 3Tera's AppLogic software, and virtualization using VMWare's software. Those technologies will be made available to Fastservers customers in the near future, says Finlayson.

"And having a little more size," he says, "the cost synergies associated with our buying power will change a little bit from how we buy colocation, how we buy bandwidth and how we buy other services in the server leasing area. That's going to help us on a cost basis as well as we go forward."

Both companies are growing month-to-month, says Finlayson, and he expects the acquisition to only further that growth.

"We've already put together a fairly lengthy integration plan," he says "which would cover each operating group from sales through data center operations etcetera, and looking at the synergies from both sides. As far as how it would work from a technology side, we're not going to force a happy set of customers at Fastservers into a grid offering or any other type of virtualization, however we're going to have that as an immediate offering. Just as with the DEFCON layers and the call center, we'll have that rolling within 60 days for the layered technologies customers as well."

The acquisition announcement comes shortly after Layered Technologies announced that it had received $11 million in funding in March of this year.