Thursday, April 27th, 2017

Time	Event
12:00p	Acquisition to Shift Contracting 365 Data Centers into Expansion Gear A pair of private investors has acquired 365 Data Centers, a colocation provider with facilities in eight US markets, most of them tier-two locations. The investors are Dublin, Ireland-based Chirisa Investments and Connecticut-based Lumerity Capital. In the announcement, they’ve indicated that this is just the start, and that more acquisitions are in store. The market continues to consolidate, and the new owners are likely to be on the look-out for more roll-up opportunities, similar to the ones pursued by another recently emerged consolidator, Digital Bridge, which since last year has acquired DataBank, C7 Data Centers, and Vantage Data Centers, as well as two 365 facilities in Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Opportunity at the Edge 365’s play has been largely focused on edge colocation services, providing space for servers that cache content in secondary markets so that content providers don’t have to pay for backhauling it from far-away hubs. The edge cuts in the opposite direction too: data collected from end-user devices needs to be stored and analyzed somewhere close to those end users, both to improve performance and to save on backhaul bandwidth. Those devices — the Internet of Things – can include everything from household appliances today to autonomous vehicles in the future. At least one analyst told Data Center Knowledge the company’s best bet going forward is to use the access to capital it gained through the acquisition to continue pursuing the edge strategy. Here’s IDC’s research manager Kelly Quinn: “I think future investments should largely be allocated to making 365 a leader in edge solutions. They’re positioned in key secondary markets, and, if they bring to market the right products and services, could serve as the edge partner for companies looking to leverage the IoT data from the millions of people in those markets.” The Services Opportunity There’s also an opportunity for 365 in beefing up its service portfolio beyond colocation, which is something the company mentioned it would do in its announcement. Here’s Jabez Tan, research director at Structure Research: “The investor appears likely to make further acquisitions to build out a more compelling data center services proposition. This will likely center around the need to better enable and orchestrate hybrid and multi-cloud IT environments for its existing and potential customers, and to also take advantage of existing relationships with its content and network customers.” Current 365 data center locations: Buffalo Chicago Detroit Indianapolis Nashville Philadelphia New York Tampa Key metrics: 126,000 square feet total 9MW of power total 25 carriers 122 network Points of Presence Market Hooks across the Pond One of the investors, Chirisa, is headed by Colm Piercy, who is also a chairman of Dataplex, a wholesale data center provider in Dublin. In a statement, Piercy said: “This investment provides Chirisa with a solid foundation to execute on its strategy to broaden its data center, managed services, and real estate reach into the US market.” A Turnaround 365’s new CEO is Bob DeSantis, who co-founded Xand, a data center provider acquired in 2014 by TierPoint, one of the most successful secondary-market data center roll-up plays in recent years. Stefanie Williams, associate analyst at 451 Research, noted that the company under new leadership appears to be changing course, from contraction to expansion: “While the company had previously appeared to be selling off its assets, it seems the new firm is looking to revive the once growing company and grow the portfolio, both in data centers and additional services.” (Comment on this)
5:30p	250 Verizon Data Center Employees to Join Equinix Equinix is planning to bring on more than 250 Verizon employees once its blockbuster $3.6 billion acquisition of 29 Verizon data centers is closed. Most Verizon employees expected to join the Redwood City, California-based data center provider are in operations, Equinix CEO Stephen Smith said on the company’s earnings call Wednesday. “To support these newly acquired sites and sectors, we expect to bring on over 250 Verizon employees, primarily in operations, and are excited to welcome these new colleagues to the Equinix family,” he said. Smith said the company expects to close the transaction “shortly.” The companies announced the deal late last year. The 29 Verizon data centers are located on 24 sites, most of them in the US, with the exception of one site in Bogotá and one in São Paulo. Read more: Why Equinix is Buying Verizon Data Centers for $3.6B As an early integration step, in the 12 metros where Equinix’s current footprint overlaps with the Verizon portfolio it is buying, the company plans to tether the assets, Smith said. That means it will link Equinix and Verizon data centers via a single wide area network in each of the metros. This is a common approach by data center providers that own several sites in a metro. This way, customers in one location in a region can easily reach partners or customers in another, set up redundant infrastructure across multiple locations, or simply treat one location as an extension of another. Verizon has been a major Equinix customer since before the deal and plans to continue providing a variety of enterprise services hosted in Equinix data centers, bundling them with the data center provider’s colocation services, and acting as an Equinix reseller. Once the acquisition is closed, Verizon will become one of Equinix’s largest customers, Smith said. Equinix reported $950 million for the first quarter, up from $845 million in same period last year. Its net income for the quarter was $42 million, up from a $37 million loss reported in the first quarter of 2016 but down from $61.7 million in income reported for the fourth quarter of last year. (Comment on this)
9:16p	Rackspace Launches Professional Services for AWS Brought to You by Talkin’ Cloud As Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to dominate the public cloud market, Rackspace is growing its managed services offerings around AWS to meet growing demand from customers of all sizes who need help managing these cloud workloads. Rackspace launched on Thursday its new portfolio of Professional Services for Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer what the company calls deep, customized expertise for AWS. According to Rackspace, the Fanatical Support for AWS Professional Services is a set of managed services designed to support customers who are just getting started with AWS or who are growing their AWS investment. The services include architectural design, migrations, cloud automation and DevOps. “We are seeing significant interest from AWS customers for specialized expertise in discrete, value added areas, and we are committed to developing our offers and capabilities to help them fully leverage AWS throughout the entirety of their cloud journey,” Prashanth Chandrasekar, vice president & general manager of Fanatical Support for AWS at Rackspace said in a statement. The company says its latest offering aligns with its broader efforts around professional services, including Global Solutions and Services (GSS), which Rackspace launched earlier this month. GSS targets enterprise customers who need support in planning, designing, migrating and managing their cloud journey. The offer supports AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Rackspace continues to invest in its managed AWS practice, as Rackspace President Jeff Cotten said it’s the fastest growing area of business the company has ever had. It was recently recognized as a Premier Consulting partner in the AWS partner Network, and its AWS team of experts has attained more than 800 AWS technical certifications. “At AWS, we’re excited about helping customers realize their target business outcomes more quickly through a combination of Rackspace’s migration capabilities, and Fanatical Support with our AWS architects and implementation specialists,” Todd Weatherby, vice president of AWS Professional Services Worldwide said in a statement. AWS is not the only public cloud that Rackspace is investing in. Last month, Rackspace signed a strategic partnership agreement with Google Cloud Platform to offer new managed services later this year. This post originally appeared here at Talkin’ Cloud.   (Comment on this)

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