Fibre wholesaler, Vocus Communications (ASX:VOC), has made its second major move into the data centre market with an agreement to acquire Perth iX for approximately $7 million.
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The deal will bring a 536 square metre facility into Vocus’ expanding portfolio, which began with the $5.9 million acquisition of Sydney and Melbourne-based data centres from E3 Networks in October last year.
Vocus opened its first dedicated data centre floorspace in December.
Under the deal with PerthIX, Vocus will pay $6.275 million in cash consideration to the Western Australian data centre operator for the company, and an additional $725,000 should the operator exceed financial forecasts from the 2012 financial year.
Current Perth iX general manager, Adam Gardner, would join Vocus as facility manager for Perth, but no staffing decisions had been as to his reporting line in the company.
“Perth is a strong growth market,” Vocus chief executive, James Spenceley, told Computerworld Australia.
“There’s still a number of ISPs over there and we haven’t had at Vocus as large a focus in Perth, so this gives us a way to enter the market with a data centre that has a lot of our key customers and potential customers in it.”
The Perth iX facility currently caters co-location services to 86 customers, some of which are already signed with Vocus for fibre wholesale services. The company would look to sell the same fibre services to new customers but remained carrier-agnostic.
However, while growing, Spenceley said Perth was still too small a market for the company to consider building its own centre in the city.
“We evaluate both options,” he said. “Building a new facility [in Perth] wasn’t our preferred option.
"Having said that, there might be other areas where building might make sense for us.”
The company posted a 92 per cent hike in revenue to $13.9 million for the first half of the 2011 financial year last month, owed in part to data centre acquisitions in Sydney and Melbourne.
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