BY DIRK PERREFORT
Hearst Connecticut Media
A Bethel data center will see significant investment upgrades in the coming months after the parent company that owns the center, Datagram, was acquired by a competitor.
Executives with SingleHop, of Chicago, announced the purchase this week of New York City-based Datagram, which provides hosting, Internet access, co-location and disaster-recovery services. In fact, when Superstorm Sandy hit and the company’s data center in Manhattan was under water, the Bethel facility was still online.
Zak Boca, the founder and CEO of SingleHop, said the acquisition of Datagram will help the company meet two objectives: expanding services in the Northeast and making it easier for customers to use their cloud-based solutions.
While companies like Datagram provide information technology services using a customer’s infrastructure, SingleHop provides both the infrastructure and 24-hour support to customers.
“Rather than buying their own servers and their own storage, and having to periodically expand that capacity, customers can rent our infrastructure on a monthly basis,” Boca said. “If a company were to expand their capacity on their own, it could cost upwards of $500,000 and take more than a month to complete. Using our service, they would have a monthly rental fee and could expand their service in less than an hour.”
He added that the company’s fastest-growing business is in hosting private clouds for their customers.
“In the past, we’ve been using exclusively our own infrastructure for private cloud hosting,” Boca said.
But with this purchase, Boca said the company can create a hybrid model where it can use the company’s infrastructure while offering its own as expansion becomes necessary.
While New Jersey is often considered the hotbed of data centers, Boca said events like Sandy showed how important it can be to have centers in other locations, including Connecticut.
Boca said the Bethel center is significantly under-utilized and they hope to make investments in the facility in the near future.
“We still have to evaluate the facility but it appears to be under-utilized in terms of both space and power so there is a number of investments that will need to be made including generator redundancy,” he said.
That was welcome news for the Janice Chrzescijanek, the town’s economic development coordinator, who noted that both Berkshire and the Clarke Business Park, which officials hope to expand in the near future, are perfect locations for companies looking to offer data centers in the Northeast.
“Bethel has been fortunate because it can support a variety of different businesses,” Chrzescijanek said. “Both of our business parks would be excellent locations for this type of business. We are looking forward to the company’s growth here and we hope it can serve as an example for other companies looking to establish a data center in the region.”
Boca declined to disclose the details of the acquisition, but noted that Datagram would operate as a separate business unit within SingleHop and that all of Datagram’s operations would remain intact.
Hearst Connecticut Media includes four daily newspapers: Connecticut Post, Greenwich Time, The Advocate (Stamford) and The News-Times (Danbury). See newstimes.com for more from this reporter.
