Bright House Networks will look to expand its portfolio for small- and medium-sized businesses after acquiring Telovations Inc., a provider of cloud-based voice services and applications, including PBX and managed SIP trunking. (See Bright House Buys Telovations .)

Financial terms were not disclosed, but if it's any hint, Tampa, Fla.-based Telovations raised a $6.5 million A round in April 2007 led by Lovett Miller & Co.

Most of Telovation's 40-plus employees are expected to join Bright House when the deal closes in the next 40 to 60 days. Company CEO and co-founder Mark Swanson will stay on in a "leadership role" and report to Craig Cowden, Bright House's senior VP of network engineering and operations and enterprise solutions, a Bright House spokeswoman said via email.

Swanson tells Light Reading Cable that Telovations is profitable, has "several hundred customers," and does business in 37 states, though the company is primarily focused on the southeastern U.S. That geographic emphasis matches up well with Bright House, which serves about 2.5 million customers in central Florida and Alabama, along with some systems in Indiana, Michigan and California.

In July, privately held Telovations said it had increased revenues 70 percent over the past two years. Telovations was founded in 2006.

Why this matters
Business services are a high-growth area for the cable industry. After starting off by serving small businesses via their Docsis networks, many MSOs are now heading further up-market with Carrier Ethernet paired with hosted, cloud-based service platforms.

And, like Bright House, some of the nation's major cable operators have pursued the cloud angle via acquisitions. Time Warner Cable Inc. (NYSE: TWC), for example, expanded into cloud services in 2011 via its $230 million acquisition of NaviSite. Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK), meanwhile, has recently introduced a new service called Business VoiceEdge that was partly born out of its purchase of New Global Telecom Inc.

And expect to hear much more about these strategies later this week. Cable's business activity in the proverbial cloud will also be a hot topic at the in New York City on Thursday at Light Reading Cable's The Future of Cable Business Services this Thursday in New York City.

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— Jeff Baumgartner, Site Editor, Light Reading Cable