Insight Enterprises, the very big US reseller, is to buy its smaller rival Software Spectrum for $287m.

The surprise here is just how long the owner, web backbone provider Level 3, held on to its subsidiary. In 2002, Level 3 bought Software Spectrum and Corporate Software, one of the first big resellers, and merged them into each other.

At the time it spouted a lot of nonsense about convergence, although we wondered what broadband and software distribution had in common. Conveniently, the purchase bulked up Level 3 sales and enabled it to avoid breaking banking covenants.

So we guess that this divestment marks the official divergence of communications and flogging commodity software to corporates.

Press release here. ®