Synergies. If you don’t have them the deal just cannot be done. Thankfully, the acquisition of previously listed Over The Wire (OTW) is expected to generate annual cost synergies from $8 million to $11 million within three years. Sweet.

ABB has acquired OTW (with the deal closing mid March) for $344M adding about 16,000 customers across business, enterprise, government, and wholesale. It also means an additional 1,000 in the team.

OTW team brings voice skills as well as those in both cloud and security.

“One of the key benefits with Over the Wire’s cloud offering is that they own all the infrastructure, either in their own data centre in Brisbane or in third party data centres nationally,” said Phillip Britt, the newly CEO Magazine* crowned Managing Director of the year.

OTW CEO, Michael Omeros will join the ABB board.

The deal was funded by ABB $114M share placement from September last year which was put forward for mergers and acquisitions.

*I'm always a skeptic of awards such as these, especially where you have to nominate yourself, however, in this case it looks like there is a reasonable voting panel 

It always amazes me how brands can be built selling what is essentially a commodity product. ABB has done it though through providing something simple - customer service.

Was talking to my manager recently and he mentioned he's an ABB customer and that he would tell anyone about them whenever they asked. It doesn't get better than that.

The proof is in the pudding too. Market share continues to be picked up in the reporting period shown Aussie Broadband took 56% of net new connections.

On the back of this, the share price had run up hard, so make your own decision if now is the time to buy.