8x8 (News - Alert) Inc. revealed on Monday that it has acquired Zerigo, as reported by TMCnet earlier today. And there could be more to come, according to 8x8 CEO Bryan Martin (News - Alert).

In a June 14 interview with TMCnet, Martin noted that the market for acquisitions has improved dramatically, adding that a lot of businesses are now looking to M&A as an attractive exit strategy. He went on to talk about how 8x8 was considering more acquisitions of companies in areas that are in adjunct areas to the services it sells.

Zerigo is a Littleton, Colo.-based company that provides virtual private servers, managed DNS services, and monitoring tools for cloud-based server operations. 8x8 says this deal, for which the terms were not disclosed, “aligns with 8x8's strategic plan to grow its cloud-based offerings through both organic and inorganic activities.”

In the interview last week, Martin noted that 8x8 sells back up services as part of its cloud offer. Right now, he said, 8x8 resells a service from a company named Mozy, but he said that 8x8 potentially could use M&A to bring that in house and, in the process, improve its margins. An acquisition related to call recording might also be attractive to 8x8, Martin added, saying the company would like to improve upon its speech-to-text functionality and call recording search tools.

He also revealed in the interview that in August 8x8 is expected to introduce a cloud-based video service.

At the same time, he added, 8x8 is ramping up its partner ecosystem. A big push for 8x8, he said, is to forge more partnerships with businesses in the data hardware space. That would include companies that sell power over Ethernet switches and traffic shapers into LANs, he said.

For more about 8x8, look for the upcoming August issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine.