Recent Deals in the Hosting Space as of 12/31/14

Acquisition News

• Host Europe Group Acquires intergenia for €210 Million. On December 19, 2014, Host Europe announced its acquisition of intergenia in a transaction with an enterprise value of €210 million. Launched in 1999, intergenia is one of Europe’s leading suppliers of professional web hosting and server solutions. As a pioneer in the dedicated server hosting market, the company represents a perfect synergy of innovation and technical know-how with its brands PlusServer, serverloft, Server4You and Unmetered.com. intergenia also operates datadock, Europe’s greenest data center.
• Atos to Acquire Xerox’s Global IT Outsourcing Business for $1 Billion. On December 18, 2014, French IT services giant Atos agreed to purchase Xerox’s IT Outsourcing business for a total of $1.05 billion. As part of this deal, Atos will become a primary IT services provider for Xerox. It is estimated Xerox’s IT Outsourcing business had 2014 revenue of $1.5 billion, Operating Income of $120 million, and 9,800 employees in 45 countries. The transaction is valued at approximately 8.7x Operating Income with accretion to Atos driven by $100 million of planned revenue synergies and $35 million of cost savings by 2017.
• MongoDB Acquires WiredTiger and its Open Source Storage Engine. In December, 2014, it was announced MongoDB had acquired WiredTiger, a company with database storage engine technology. WiredTiger will be integrated into MongoDB for performance, scalability, and hardware efficiency gains in the upcoming MongoDB 2.8. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. MongoDB is one of the front runners in the high-growth NoSQL database market with a vast community of developers as supporters. In 2013, Rackspace acquired ObjectRocket, a database-as-a-service offering that uses MongoDB.
• Onyx Group Buys £10 Million Knowledge IT. In December 2014, UK-based Onyx Group announced the acquisition of Knowledge IT, an information and communications technology solutions and support firm. This move significantly enhances Onyx’s consulting and managed service capability. Since 2000, the Onlyx has completed five major acquisitions and will exceed revenue of £20 million in 2014, a 13% increase over the previous year. However, at £10 million, the purchase of North East based Knowledge IT is the biggest acquisition to date, and will boost Onyx’s run rate revenue to over £30 million.
• Teradata Acquires RainStor. On December 17, 2014, Teradata, a big data analytics and marketing applications company, announced that it completed the acquisition of RainStor, a privately held company specializing in online big data archiving on Hadoop. This acquisition strengthens Teradata’s enterprise-grade Hadoop solutions and will enable organizations to add archival data store capabilities for their entire enterprise, including data stored in OLTP, data warehouses, and applications.

Financings

• Equinix Completes $1.5 Billion Senior Credit Facility. On December 18, 2014, Equinix announced the closing of its $1.5 billion five-year senior secured credit facility. The company intends to use the remaining proceeds of the term loan facility and the proceeds of borrowings under the revolving credit facility for general corporate purposes, which may include capital expenditures, and distributions to its stockholders, including distributions in connection with Equinix’s proposed conversion to a real estate investment trust and potential strategic transactions.
• MacStadium Closes $1 Million in Series A Funding. In December 2014, MacStadium, a leading global provider of Mac hosting, cloud computing and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), announced that it closed $1 million in Series A equity funding. MacStadium’s hosting services are designed to support the growing number of enterprises and businesses that need a world-class infrastructure and that also rely on Apple’s Mac hardware and/or its OS X operating system as their computing and IT platform of choice.
• NewSpring Capital Makes Growth Investment in EnterpriseDB. In December 2014, NewSpring Capital co-led an investment in EnterpriseDB, which offers enterprise-class products and services based on the open source database PostgreSQL. EDB extends Postgres with enterprise-class performance, security and management enhancements for its Postgres Plus family of products.
• CIT Serves as Lead Arranger in $55.5 Million Financing to T5@Portland. On December 22, 2014, CIT announced it served as Lead Arranger in a $55.5 million senior secured credit facility to T5@Portland, a subsidiary of T5 Data Centers, an owner and operator of server-ready single and multi-tenant data centers across North America. The proceeds from the facility will be used to finance the construction of the T5 Portland Project, a 104,000 sq. ft. Tier III data center in the Portland, Oregon suburb of Hillsboro.
• QTS Increases Unsecured Credit Facility to $650 Million. On December 22, 2014, QTS Realty Trust announced its unsecured credit facility has been increased to $650 million, up from $560 million. In addition, the unsecured credit facility maturity date was extended through December 17, 2019 in relation to the $100 million term loan portion and December 17, 2018 in relation to the $550 million revolving credit portion of the facility. The $550 million revolving credit facility also has a one-year extension option to December 17, 2019.

Market Sizing

• Data Center Colocation Market Now at $25 Billion Globally. According to the latest release of the Datacenter Knowledge Base (DCKB) from 451 Research, the global colocation market has surpassed a run rate of $25 billion in revenue with 6% of data center firms accounting for more than half of global revenue. The DCKB database covers 3,685 individual data centers from 1,086 data center companies worldwide. Data shows a pattern of market concentration with firms at the top with a long tail of firms at the bottom of the global colocation market.
• North America Managed Services Market Projected to Reach $72.5 Billion by 2019. According to the North America Managed Services Market report, increasing customer demand has led MSPs to expand their services portfolio. This has increased the competition in this market and led to high growth in some of the segments in 2014, for example, Managed Data Center. The North American Managed Services Market is projected to reach $72.5 billion by 2019 from $50.8 billion in 2013, with a CAGR of 5.9% between 2014 and 2019.

Other News

• Equinix Board of Directors Approves REIT Conversion. On December 23, 2014, Equinix announced its board of directors unanimously approved Equinix’s conversion to a REIT for federal income tax purposes effective for the year commencing January 1, 2015. Equinix has not received its Private Letter Ruling, (PLR) from the IRS, but, based on existing legal precedent, opinions of counsel and the fact that many other data center companies currently operate as REITs, Equinix believes that it will qualify for taxation as a REIT and that it will receive a favorable PLR early in 2015.
• Senate Bill with Data Center Energy Provisions Blocked. According to Datacenter Knowledge, Federal energy efficiency legislation that included several provisions about data center efficiency has stalled in the Senate. Senator Tom Coburn blocked the bipartisan Energy Efficiency Improvement Act of 2014, a bill the House passed in March. The most influential part in the section of the bill that has to do with data centers is a requirement that the Department of Energy updates the government’s official estimate of the total amount of energy all data centers in the U.S. consume.
• Cavern Technologies Doubles Size of Underground Data Center Near Kansas City. According to Data Center Knowledge, Cavern Technologies nearly doubled the amount of space built out for tenants in its underground data center near Kansas City. The data center is located in a massive cave, where its biggest neighbor is the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The data center provider recently commissioned a 60,000 sq. ft. Phase I of an ongoing expansion project, and the company had built out 65,000 sq. ft. of data center space for customers prior to the expansion.
• ClearDATA Completes Strong 2014. On December 31, 2014, ClearDATA announced 2014 was a banner year for the provider of cloud computing, platform and information security services to the healthcare sector. Among the company’s leading accomplishments were key partnerships with major health IT companies, new products, awards and recognition. More than 300,000 healthcare practitioners rely on ClearDATA’s secure, HIPAA-compliant, HITRUST CSF-certified cloud HealthDATA infrastructure and platform.