British web hosting provider Iomart Group forecast half-year and full-year results ahead of market estimates, as it saw robust demand for its products from customers during the first half. The company also said it would pursue acquisition opportunities to accelerate growth and continued to win a number of contracts in the cloud computing space.

Analysts on average expect a pre-tax profit of £2.1 million on revenue of £22.2 million for the year ending March 2011, according to Thomson Reuter.

Source: Reuters

GetLisa Information Services has announced a significant expansion of its data centre and NOC facility in Boulder, CO. In addition to upgrading its existing facilities, GetLisa has also signed a multi-year agreement with the most advanced data centre in Boulder to create an enterprise-level colocation facility.

Nearly 2,800 participants have registered for the Carbon Reduction Commitment scheme, according to the Environment Agency, and registration has now closed. The scheme uses the threat of financial penalties to steer organisations that consume a lot of power towards becoming more energy-efficient. However, some data centre operators have suggested that the costs involved in becoming compliant with the programme could be passed down to their customers.

ViaWest, a Denver-based data management provider, has announced its acquisition of the data centre assets of Consonus, a Salt Lake City-based colocation provider. ViaWest provides colocation, managed hosting solutions and other comprehensive services to more than 1300 enterprise and mid-level businesses across the country.

CAS Infra, a group company of CAS Trading House, the leading IT System Integration company in Nepal and Appnomic Systems, a specialist Remote Infrastructure & Application Management Services company, have announced launching of the first commercial data centre in Nepal. This data centre will provide a world-class colocation, hosting facility and comprehensive Managed IT Services to businesses in Nepal.

Apple paid as much as US$1.7 million for one acre of land near its US$1 billion North Carolina data centre, which is nearing completion. County records obtained by Bloomberg show that Apple purchased Donnie and Kathy Fulbright's one-acre property near Maiden, N.C., for $1.7 million. The Fulbrights had purchased the land for $6,000 and lived there for over 30 years.

Business communications provider Viatel has announced the sale of its UK Retail business VTL (UK) Ltd to MDNX Holding. Viatel had reportedly already separated its retail arm from the European Network business and had been operating them as independent business units for the last year.

Viatel will continue to operate its European Network and business, selling Bandwidth, Fibre, Ethernet and Colocation as usual. It's European business will continue to use the brand 'VTLWaveNet, part of the Viatel Group'.

Source: ISP

Managed IT hosting services provider Netmagic Solutions will expand its data centre footprint across the country. The company will increase investment in R&D for their cloud computing platform and other focus solution areas.

Netmagic announced that it has raised Rs. 70 crores in a financing round led by Nokia Growth Partners and Cisco Systems. Existing investors Fidelity International and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the round. The funding will enable Netmagic Solutions to increase its data centre footprint in Tier - I cities across India.

CIBER Polska, a branch of the international IT outsourcing and software giant, is to open an International IT Service Centre in Poznan, mid-western Poland. Its employees are to service largest international corporations. This will be the first centre of this kind in Eastern Europe,

US-based CIBER has 90 branches in 18 American, Asian and European countries, as well as 14 global IT service centres.

Source: Polish Market

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Peak 10, a managed services company with world-class data centres and Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, a leading private equity firm, have announced the closure of a transaction in which Welsh Carson has become the majority shareholder of Peak 10. As part of the acquisition, Peak 10 has closed a new credit facility for IS$155 million. RBC Capital Markets and General Electric Capital Corporation were the Joint Lead Arrangers and Joint Book Runners for the bank syndicate.

Equinix has announced it expects 2010 third quarter and full year revenues will be below the Company’s previous outlook, and it expects 2010 third quarter and full year adjusted EBITDA will be above the Company’s previous outlook, both provided on July 28, 2010.

Hosting Metro has announced that it has reached an agreement with long-time Las Vegas web host company Bizwala Hosting. With the agreement in place, Hosting Metro will migrate their existing services and marketing to its own operations.

As part of the transition, Hosting Metro is also expanding its colocation capabilities by expanding its Western U.S. operations and giving their customers the ability to colocate in Dallas or Las Vegas.

Source: PR Web

Savvis, a leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises, has reaffirmed and narrowed its guidance for full year 2010. Savvis expects the following: Revenue of US$917 to US$927 million, a increase from the low end of previous guidance of US$912 million; Adjusted EBITDA of US$220 to US$240 million and total cash capital expenditures of US$190 to US$210 million.

Savvis plans to release its third quarter 2010 financial results before the market opens on Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2010.

Source: Market Watch

A panic seemed to hit the data centre sector on Wednesday, when a revenue warning from Equinix sparked a sharp selloff on shares across the group. Equinix trimmed its forecast, saying it lost more customers in North America than expected, as well as “greater than expected discounting” to close its contract renewals and disappointing revenue from a recent acquisition. The warning caused Equinix shares to plunge $34.75, or more than 33%, to close at $70.34 Wednesday.

Data centre operator Data Centers Canada has announced it has opened its Phase 3 data centre POD space at its Toronto North facility.

The Phase 3 POD has approximately 125 cabinets with single-cabinet, cabinet clusters and private cage configurations available to customers. Located 13 miles north of Toronto in Vaughan, the facility is in close proximity to Pearson International Airport and the downtown financial district. The 8,000 sq ft facility was built in 2004.

Source: The WHIR

NaviSite, a premier provider of enterprise-class hosting, managed application, managed messaging and managed cloud services, has reported financial results for the fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2010 ended July 31, 2010.

Yahoo Japan is planning to build a data centre in the Fukushima Prefecture. The data centre will be built in Shirakawa by IDC Frontier, a wholly-owned Yahoo Japan subsidiary that has also constructed the search engine company's data centre in Kitakyushu in 2008.

The new data centre will be built on a 25,000 sq m site which will accommodate as many as six buildings, with the first building scheduled for completion in March 2012,. The company also has smaller data centres in Tokyo and the Kansai area.

Source: Telecom Paper

Kazakhstani national operator Kazakhtelecom has launched a new data centre in Mangistau.

The operator currently owns 10 data centres in various regions across the country. Kazakhtelecom also provides iD services in its centres in Astana, Almaty, Shymkent, Atyrau and Karaganda.

Source: Trading Markets

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A data centre business set up by Royal Bank of Scotland at the height of the dotcom boom is doubling capacity under an £8 million investment plan that will see it take on a third more staff. Scolocate, set up in 1999, is already the largest of Scotland's "internet hotels", providing businesses and public sector bodies with remotely hosted computer services. Having survived the tech crash and a management shake-up in 2001, the firm booked turnover of £4.9 million last year. It remains majority owned by RBS.

Syntigo and Siemens IT Solutions and Services have announced the establishment of a joint venture under Belgian law, AlphaCloud NV/SA, of which the registered offices will be in Muizen (Mechelen). The purpose of this new entity, in which each of the partners holds a 50 % stake, is to build and subsequently jointly operate a data centre that covers an area of 3000 m². The data centre will be erected in Muizen on an SNCB-Holding site and will meet the highest requirements in terms of energy efficiency.

i/o Data Centers received US$200 million in financing in two deals that will help the company expand over the next 12 months. The Phoenix-based data centre received US$130 million in a senior long-term credit facility from Wells Fargo Bank and Wells Fargo Securities along with US$70 million from Caterpillar Financial Services Corp., the company announced late Monday.

The move will allow the company to add about 35 megawatts of data centre capacity, considerably more than its Phoenix ONE centre, which currently has as one of the 10 largest data centres in the world.

County leaders foresee big news for a quiet park off Riverside Court. T5 Partners control more than 260 acres off US 74 near Ingles. For now, that land is empty. But soon, officials hope, there could be five or six data centres installed and operational.

The country's second-ranked national mobile service provider, MegaFon has put into operation a world-class state-of-the-art Tier 3 data centre. The largest of its kind in Russia, the telecommunications facility was officially opened on Friday, 8 October, 2010 in the city of Samara. The data centre is set to become the flagship of the industry nationwide, and the backbone of the future national data centre network.

The opening of the 74,400 sq ft Samara Data Center marked the completion of a US$30 million project launched by MegaFon two years ago.

The Rajasthan State Beverages, Rajasthan State Excise Department and Rajasthan State Ganganagar Sugar Mills had jointly raised a need of a total managed IT Services to establish a data centre and maintain the facility at Udaipur as well as web-based integrated excise management application software for all the three departments along with a disaster recovery site at State data centre Jaipur to benefit from uninterrupted infrastructure and online resources.

Atos Origin SA, France’s second- biggest provider of computer services, confirmed its full-year outlook after third-quarter sales declined in line with its targets.

Revenue at Paris-based Atos fell 3.5% to €1.21 billion in the quarter, compared with €1.25 billion (US$1.8 billion) last year, the company said in a statement. The consulting unit saw the largest decline, with sales sliding 11.2% to €48 million, while transactional services sales climbed 5.5% to €258 million.

Source: Business Week

Verizon was represented by a dozen major players at a public hearing Tuesday to rezone a portion of the AES property for a US$500 million data centre. The town courtroom was nearly filled as Bruce Biesecker, the Verizon project manager, showed drawings of the plans on the 160-acre site. Three buildings, 300,000 sq ft each, would make the Lake Road site among the biggest of Verizon's 250 data centres around the world.

Telx, an interconnection and colocation provider in strategic North American markets, has announced that it has nearly doubled the footprint of its data centre at the 111 8th Avenue facility in New York City, considered the premier Financial Markets location in the NY Metro area.

The addition of 40,000 sq ft of capacity for financial institutions, telecommunications service providers, cloud providers and Software as a Service providers allows Telx to expand colocation and interconnection services and establishes them as the dominant provider in this key location.

Interoute Communications, owner operator of Europe’s largest next-generation network, has announced EBITDA of €28 million for the first six months of 2010. This represents an increase in absolute EBITDA of 18% over the same period in 2009, while EBITDA margin rose to 20%.

Google Inc.'s third-quarter earnings climbed 32 % to beat Wall Street's expectations as companies spent more to advertise to Web surfers. The web search leader clocked an impressive performance despite adding 1,500 workers in the quarter, for a total of 3,500 new employees so far this year. Google also spent more than four times as much on data centres and other equipment than it did a year ago.

Indian IT outsourcing firm Infosys has reported strong profits and raised its revenue forecast, despite expressing fears over the strengthening rupee. Profits for the three months to September beat expectations, at US$374million, up from US$317 million a year ago.

The company also raised its revenue growth forecast to 21%-24%.

Source: BBC

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SDLP Foyle MP Mark Durkan has welcomed a promised data centre which could see more than £100 million invested in a site along the Buncrana Road at the Londonderry-Donegal border.

A high profile campaign was launched in the North West to secure a data centre in Londonderry following the completion of Hibernia Atlantic's multi-million pound Project Kelvin. Mr Durkan was one of those spearheading the campaign. He said: "This proposal is a welcome sign of the potential that Project Kelvin offers to secure investment and employment in the North West.

Iowa is beginning to consolidate its IT infrastructure according to a new executive order signed by Governor Culver on Friday. The order outlines the steps the state will take to streamline its IT operations and look for ways to cut costs. The Governor claims that the planned outlined in the order draws on best practices from other states that have already consolidated their technology infrastructure.

Shoe Zone Group, which includes nearly 800 Shoe Zone and Stead & Simpson store locations throughout the UK and Ireland has announced that C24, the hosting and application delivery specialist, has won its account to host and manage its internet retail presence and website disaster recovery.

The solution provided by C24 will be delivered from a tier 4 data centre and includes website hosting, back-up, disaster recovery and 24 hour support. Shoe Zone found in C24 a partner with the experience and ethos to manage their web presence successfully with maximum uptime.

BSNL previews their ambitious plans to launch dedicated Internet data centre facilities located in six cities in India designed and managed by Datacraft to the highest global IT standards, for a highly secure, scalable and robust environment.

VMware reported another highly profitable financial quarter after the New York Stock Exchange bell Oct. 18, but because it wasn't quite what Wall Street was expecting, its stock price took a sharp 6.6 percent hit in after-hours trading.

EMC the world's biggest maker of storage computers, said third-quarter profit rose 58% on rising demand for storage and security products.

Net income advanced to US$472.5 million, EMC said. Sales rose 20% to US$4.21 billion, beating the US$4.14 billion average projection. The company is benefiting as companies use its products to store and secure information on remote computers, rather than on the desktop, said Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst Troy Jensen. That method, known as cloud computing, lets customers use the Internet to access the data.

Global IT spending will rise by more than three per cent to us$2.5 trillion in 2011, according to new figures from Gartner.

Keppel Telecommunications & Transportation has booked a third quarter net profit of S$15.3 million before exceptional items, up 17.4% year-on-year. This was on the back of a 4.9 % drop in revenue to about S$28.2 million.

The company said in the coming months, its data centres in Singapore and Ireland are expected to enjoy full occupancy. Keppel T&T will be looking to further expand the facilities, and also grow through investments through its data centre fund.

Source: Channel News Asia

Sahara Net, Saudi Arabia’s leading ISP for the corporate and business sector, is ramping up expansion in its home country and plans to expand into new markets across the Middle East region, according to Kais Al-Essa, Operations and Technical Services Manager. The company, which started services in 1994 as one of the first companies to offer internet services to the public in Saudi Arabia, is also eyeing the cloud computing sector, with plans to expand into the virtualisation and cloud computing space.

Juniper posted third quarter results light on revenue but with earnings in line with Wall Street estimates. For the period ended Sept. 30, Juniper posted revenue of US$1.01 billion, a rise of 23% annually and 3% from the second quarter. Earnings came in at US$171.5 million, right where analysts and Juniper expected. That equates to 32 cents per diluted share on a non-GAAP (excluding expenses, charges and other items) basis.

A Tennessee Valley Authority economic development program has identified a dozen sites in the Southeast as prime locations for developing the region's growing data centre industry. The initial sites identified in the TVA survey are in: Athens, Tenn.; Bristol, Tenn.; Duffield, Va.; Fayetteville, Tenn.; Guntersville, Ala.; Hartselle, Ala.; Jackson, Tenn.; Lenoir City, Tenn.; Maryville, Tenn.; Murfreesboro, Tenn.; Olive Branch, Miss.; and Tullahoma, Tenn.

Google has announced that it is resuming work on its data centre at Mid-America Industrial Park in Pryor, a US$600 million project that has been on hold since 2008. The company expects the facility to be fully operational late next year. Eventually, it will employ 100 people, officials said.

Despite its "cautiously aggressive" stance, Digital Realty Trust has heeded its existing customer base's request to expand beyond its stronghold in U.S. and Europe into Asia-Pacific and is now working from scratch to build its business in four markets in the region, said company executives.

Easynet's new private equity owners plan to make one in 20 staff redundant, they announced this week. Some 55 jobs are to go as the firm aims to focus on corporate networking customers. Insiders fear more roles are yet to be cut. They said the first casualties include the UK hosting team, the global marketing director and head of UK small business.

"These transformation plans include a number of important business, and associated organisational changes, to ensure we deliver greater levels of efficiency and improved operational performance," an Easynet spokeswoman said.

India’s third-largest software firm Wipro said that quarterly net profit came in below market expectations as volatility in the rupee hit demand for outsourcing firms.

The Bangalore-based firm reported net profit rose 9.7% to 12.85 billion rupees (US$288 million) in the three months to the end of September, from 11.7 billion rupees in the same period a year earlier. It said in a statement to the Mumbai stock exchange that revenues increased 12% to 77.3 billion rupees.

Source: AFP

Cloud computing and virtualization firm rPath has raised a US$7 million equity round from four investors, according to a regulatory filing. The Raleigh-based company sells applications to automate software system construction, deployment and maintenance across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

The company disclosed the raise in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The company has between US$1 million and US$5 million in revenue, according to the filing.

Source: Tech Journal

Multinational corporations can take advantage of a new network alliance Verizon has formed with Gateway Business Africa that will expand Verizon Business Private IP network capabilities in several African countries.

CSC has struck out in a new direction sketching out a long-term position as a “service integrator” and laying out a cloud strategy that goes beyond the usual hype. CSC needed to realign and refocus as the large outsourcing opportunities declined and its customers transform and trigger demand for new, agile services.

Hosting firm UKFast has said it is now a carbon neutral company, and aims to help its customers go down that path themselves by continuing to use its data services. UKFast has also just launched new company UKFast Energy with the backing of the Co-operative Bank, which will provide carbon-neutral energy services.

Unisys has announced that its European subsidiary Unisys Limited has entered into a contract to provide Colt Technology Services with infrastructure, cloud management software and services. After the initial UK implementation, the companies intend to provide the services from an additional six data centres within Colt's European network. Both Colt and Unisys will use this environment to deliver cloud-based
services to their customers throughout Europe.

Data centre construction firm DataSpace Partners has announced earlier this month it will use a US$150 million loan to build or convert industrial sites in Moscow into data centres. The board of directors of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation has approved the financing. The data centre project will generate 60 new local jobs.

Critical backup power systems and continuous power solutions manufacturer Active Power, has announced results for its third quarter ended Sept. 30, 2010.

Plans have been unveiled for a cross border data centre which could see more than £100m invested in the Derry-Bridgend area. Detailed proposals for the high tech "tier four data centre" have been lodged with planning authorities on both sides of the border, as identical buildings are planned for each jurisdiction.

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, has reported quarterly results for the quarter ended September 30, 2010.

The cost of power is a major consideration when locating a mega data centre. But another factor is playing an increasing role: Taxes. "The site selection process has changed from low energy, to low energy and low taxes, to taxes and low energy," says KC Mares, president and chief energy officer for Megawatt Consulting, which designs energy efficient data centres.

SunGard, one of the world’s leading software and technology services companies, today reported results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2010. For the quarter, revenue was US$1.24 billion, down 7% year over year. Adjusted EBITDA was US$338 million, down 10%, and adjusted income from operations was US$251 million, down 16%. Excluding the results of one of our trading systems businesses, a broker/dealer, revenue was down 2%.

QTS, one of the nation's largest and fastest-growing providers of data centres and managed services, has announced the closing of a new, US$125 million revolving credit facility. The credit facility is secured by the QTS Atlanta Metro Data Center asset. The facility also provides for an accordion feature to increase the amount of the facility up to US$250 million.