Michael Gold

Building a Cloud Empire Nobody Can Name

In March 2026, private equity firm 26North Partners announced it was acquiring Intermedia Intelligent Communications - a cloud communications business generating more than $430 million in annual recurring revenue, growing at 20 percent year over year, with 150,000 business customers across the globe. The announcement landed without much public drama. That is exactly how Michael Gold, Intermedia's Chairman and CEO, prefers it.

Gold has led Intermedia since 2011. In tech years, where the average public company CEO tenure barely clears four years, fifteen years in the same seat is less a career milestone and more an act of defiance. He came in alongside Phil Koen, former CEO of SAVVIS, when the two partnered with Oak Hill Capital Partners to acquire the company from its founder. He has survived two private equity ownership changes, a postponed IPO, a pandemic, and a competitive market that has absorbed Cisco, Microsoft, RingCentral, and Zoom - all while keeping Intermedia's name largely out of the conversation.

That invisibility is the whole point. Ninety-five percent of Intermedia's revenue flows through channel partners - telcos, managed service providers, VARs, and IT firms - who resell its technology under their own brand names. Costco Business Solutions. NEC UNIVERGE BLUE. Hundreds of others. The customer thinks they're buying from whoever sold it to them. Gold would not have it any other way.

Why Partners Take All the Credit - and Generate All the Value

Gold's signature strategic bet is the Customer Ownership Reseller model, abbreviated CORE. Under CORE, a channel partner - say, a regional IT firm or a national telecom - doesn't just sell Intermedia's platform. They brand it as their own, own the customer relationship, and handle billing and support. Intermedia becomes the invisible infrastructure underneath.

The math is counterintuitive but compelling. Agent-model relationships, where a salesperson collects a commission and moves on, generate a thin slice of lifetime customer value. A partner who owns the account has every incentive to expand it, retain it, and build around it. Gold estimates CORE partners earn five times more revenue per customer. Intermedia, meanwhile, gets sticky recurring revenue with dramatically lower customer acquisition cost.

It is a model built on a structural insight: most businesses don't want to be reminded that their phone system, their video conferencing, their contact center, and their email archive all run on the same platform from a company in Sunnyvale. They want to believe it's their provider's product. Gold has turned that preference into a $430 million business.

Thirty Years of Building in the Cloud, Before the Cloud Had a Name

Gold graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1986, then earned his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1989. The combination - deep technical fluency paired with business school sharpness - traces through every role he has held since.

His early career ran through the infrastructure and connectivity world of the late 1990s. At Qwest Communications, as Senior Vice President with P&L responsibility for the Internet Products division, he launched the company's CyberCenter datacenter and hosting business - a nascent precursor to what would become cloud computing. This was 1999, when "the cloud" meant a clip art icon in a network diagram.

He followed that with two consecutive CEO roles at companies built for acquisition. Vicorp, a software company he led, was acquired by Motorola. Sphera, a cloud services company, was acquired by Ingram Micro and folded into Parallels - where Gold became a Senior Vice President. There is a pattern here: Gold builds things other companies want.

In 2008, he founded Zlago, a channel-focused cloud services company he grew through a nationwide network of managed service providers and VARs. Three years later, Zlago was acquired by Intermedia - and Gold flipped from seller to operator, joining as President. He was promoted to CEO and, eventually, became Chairman as well. The company that acquired his startup is now the company he runs. That particular arc is rare enough to be worth noting.

From Partnership to Full Ownership: A Five-Year Pivot That Became a Landmark Deal

In 2020, Intermedia and NEC, the Japanese electronics and IT services giant, launched the UNIVERGE BLUE brand together - a cloud communications product that NEC would sell to its existing enterprise base while Intermedia provided the underlying platform. It began as a five-year agreement. Within years, that commitment stretched to ten, with NEC pledging $40 million toward Intermedia's planned IPO.

The IPO never happened. In late 2023, Gold postponed the offering, citing adverse market conditions for tech companies. But the NEC relationship didn't stall - it accelerated. In September 2024, Intermedia and NEC entered a definitive agreement for Intermedia to assume full operations of NEC's UNIVERGE BLUE UCaaS and CCaaS business across North America and Europe. The transition closed in October 2024, adding thousands of NEC's channel partners and business customers directly to Intermedia's network.

The NEC move is a useful lens for understanding how Gold builds. He does not chase headlines. He builds partnerships with strategic depth, expands them patiently, and converts them into long-term structural advantages. The reseller who trusts Intermedia's platform enough to put NEC's name on it for four years is the same reseller who brings thousands of customers over when the relationship formalizes.

26North, $430M+ ARR, and the Market That's 95% Untapped

In March 2026, 26North Partners LP - a private equity firm whose portfolio spans technology and business services - announced an agreement to acquire Intermedia from funds managed by Madison Dearborn Partners. The deal, expected to close in the second quarter of 2026, values a company that generates over $430 million in annual recurring revenue and has been growing its core communications business at 20 percent year over year.

Critically, Gold is staying. He will remain Chairman and CEO after the transaction closes. In an industry where private equity acquisitions often signal leadership churn, that continuity is a deliberate signal - and an earned one. Gold has now navigated Intermedia through three ownership structures over fifteen years, building the business through each transition rather than coasting on prior momentum.

The strategic logic for the next phase is already visible in Intermedia's positioning. The company's AI-powered integrations - intelligent archiving, contact center analytics, productivity insights layered across Microsoft Teams, Azure, and its own Ascend partner program - represent the next wave of value creation in UCaaS. Fifty-plus service providers are already enrolled in the Ascend program. The partners who have trusted Intermedia to power their cloud offerings are now being equipped to sell AI-enhanced communications as their own product.

Meanwhile, the market opportunity remains staggering. Of 430 million global business telephony seats, roughly 20 million have migrated to cloud UCaaS. The other 410 million still run on-premises systems - legacy PBXs, physical infrastructure, proprietary hardware maintained by shrinking IT departments. Every one of those seats is a potential Intermedia customer, reached through a partner who already has the relationship. Gold has been patient about this for fifteen years. He can afford to be patient about it for fifteen more.

Quietly Decorated