SoftLayer Technologies and The Planet Merge to Become Mega-provider

The hosting industry still has plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurs, but it’s also inevitable that growth will come from acquisition as well as organically. The result will be larger providers, with broader coverage and more services-a win for consumers.

The latest in this trend is a merger between SoftLayer Technologies and The Planet. The new entity will be one of the largest hosting and cloud computing providers in the world.

In addition to a trend towards consolidation, the industry is also seeing a move away from legacy hosting and towards more automated platforms-which gives business users and consumers a much easier way to manage their hosting, greater scalability, and more management tools. The new SoftLayer will move The Planet’s dedicated server and managed hosting customers onto SoftLayer’s automated platform. Although there will not be a forced migration, the SoftLayer platform will be the new company standard.

The deal was first announced in August, and it closed today, according to an announcement from private equity firm GI Partners. The transition is likely to be very smooth, as SoftLayer was actually created by former The Planet staff members, and there has always been a high level of familiarity between the two companies.

The new company, which will be called SoftLayer, has more than 25,000 customers and 76,000 servers in 13 data centers, throughout the United States and Europe. The company, which is predicting $260 million in revenue for 2010, will offer both dedicated and managed hosting, cloud computing, ad collocation services.