Peak 10 to Buy ViaWest in Big Data-Center Deal

Peak 10 announced Tuesday that it will acquire ViaWest from Shaw Communications for nearly $1.7 billion in cash. GI Partners, a former investor in ViaWest that acquired Peak 10 in 2014, will remain the majority shareholder. Chris Downie, CEO of Peak 10, will lead the combined company, while Nancy Phillips, currently CEO of ViaWest, will become the executive chair of the board.

Peak 10’s Mike Fuhrman

After the deal closes, expected in the third quarter, Peak 10 will serve some 4,400 customers from data centers in 20 domestic and international markets: Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Dallas, Denver, Ft. Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Las Vegas, Louisville, Minneapolis, Nashville, Phoenix, Portland, Raleigh, Richmond, Salt Lake City and Tampa in the United States — along with facilities in Amsterdam and Calgary.

In an interview, Peak 10 CTO Mike Fuhrman told Channel Partners that the company has been actively looking, for six to nine months, to add to its 900,000 square feet of data-center space, mainly on the East Coast, serving some 2,200 customers.

“People tend to think of Peak 10 as a regional entity,” said Fuhrman. “The truth is we draw from almost everywhere, including California and Puerto Rico.”

Now, it will have data centers closer to those customers and a nationwide footprint supporting its colocation, connectivity, private and public cloud utilities, as well as advanced managed solutions.

“We’ll have three different types of cloud offerings that we provide,” said Fuhrman. “We do multi-tenant along with what we call ‘virtual private data center,’ where you have shared compute, storage and memory resources but a private network. And then you have totally dedicated hosted private cloud infrastructure.”

There are also a number of managed services for partners to resell, including DRaaS, assistance in migrating workloads into the facility, ongoing management of operating systems and managed security. “We’re a very partner-driven culture,” said Fuhrman.

In a statement, Phillips said that the combination of ViaWest and Peak 10 creates the largest privately held provider of data-center infrastructure, cloud technology and managed IT solutions in North America.

“We believe that bringing together these hybrid IT infrastructure companies strengthens ViaWest’s position among its competitors and, as a combined entity, will be able to further leverage and maximize growth opportunities,” she said.