Industrial conglomerate Emerson Electric Co said raw materials inflation created headwinds in two of its biggest segments, as it reported quarterly profit that fell short of Wall Street expectations.

The maker of factory automation systems and network power systems for large data centres posted net earnings of US$480 million in the fiscal first quarter ended Dec 31, compared with US$425 million a year earlier.

Source: Reuters

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Data Foundry, a provider of wholesale and retail data centre outsourcing, colocation, and disaster recovery services, has announced the selection of JPMorgan Chase Bank, as the sole lender for the company's next-generation data centre facility, Texas 1.

The IT arm of technology conglomerate IPVG, has announced that it has signed a P105-million loan agreement with Banco De Oro to finance the construction of a new Internet data centre facility in Bonifacio City in Taguig.

Time Warner Cable has announced that it has acquired NaviSite, a provider of enterprise-class hosting, managed application, messaging and cloud services, for US$5.50 per share in cash, or US$230 million. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2011.

The City of Greater Sudbury is planning to build a multimillion-dollar Regional Data Centre "to meet the growing, secure data management needs of a wide range of Northern Ontario clients." The city is partnering with Sudbury Regional Hospital to develop the project concept -- a large and secure data storage centre that would provide a wealth of economic opportunities for the city, according a staff report.

Telecoms provider BT reported a 7% increase in third-quarter core profit as it continued to cut costs, and said its recovering Global Services unit would generate free cash flow this year. Britain's biggest fixed-line services supplier said on Thursday it had gained market share in retail broadband, winning 53% of new customers in the quarter to end-December. It said the results gave it confidence in its outlook.

Total revenue fell 3% to £5.04 billion, while earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of £1.48 billion was ahead of market forecasts.

Alpheus Communications, the largest competitive fibre network operator in Texas, announced today that it has acquired valuable new fibre rings in east Dallas County and Downtown Fort Worth from FiberLight.

The transaction constitutes Alpheus’ fifth major fibre acquisition in the last five years. In addition to fibre purchases, the company also builds rings and laterals in order to serve the high growth corridors in Texas and operates hardened data centres at the edges of a carrier-grade optical network.

Source: Bradenton

The National Security Agency is planning to build a new utility plant at its Fort George G. Meade headquarters, a US$219 million project that could mean big business for contractors in Greater Baltimore.

Terremark Worldwide, a global provider of managed IT infrastructure services, has reported its results for the quarter ended December 31, 2010. Terremark delivered strong growth with total revenues of $94.3 million and EBITDA, as adjusted, of US$28.5 million for the quarter, representing year-over-year increases of 27% and 44%, respectively.

Total revenues for the quarter ended December 31, 2010 were US$94.3 million, representing a 27% year-over-year increase.

Source: Trading Markets

The economic impact of shutting down internet access in Egypt for five days resulted in a loss of more than US$90 million, industry experts said. "The move to ban internet services has resulted in direct costs of around US$5 million per day and the ban on mobile services has resulted in more than US$14 million in losses while indirect costs have been huge," Hussam Barhoush, Senior Analyst at Pyramid Research, said.

The Higher Education Funding Council of England has allocated £12.5 million to a new cloud computing shared services initiative for universities and colleges. Last week, HEFCE announcemed the details of its cuts to university funding. In what HEFCE chief executive Sir Alan Langlands described as a “challenging financial settlement”, £940 million will cut from teaching, research and buildings budgets in the coming financial year.

Violin Memory has raised US$35 Million in a second round of funding that included Toshiba Corp. Toshiba previously invested in the Mountain View company in April 2010. Also joining the new round was the Sunnyvale-based networking equipment maker Juniper Networks along with corporate partners and unnamed investors.

Violin Memory is developing data centre storage systems that use flash memory, which offers faster speed but until recently has been more expensive than hard-disk technology

Source: San Francisco Business Times

The total value of worldwide IT services contracts signed in the final three months of 2010 was 66% higher than the previous three months, according to research from Ovum.

Savvis, a leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises, has reported its fourth quarter 2010 financial results, with revenue of US$252.7 million, compared to US$219.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2009. Adjusted EBITDA was US$67.8 million, compared to US$54.9 million of adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter of 2009.

TW Telecom has posted a 5% increase in revenue in 2010 and saw its net income grow tenfold due largely to a one-time tax benefit.

After a US$227 million tax benefit, the Douglas County-based business telecom posted a yearlong profit of US$271 million on revenue of US$1.3 billion, the company reported. That compares to a US$27.6 million profit on US$1.2 billion revenue posted in 2009.

Source: Denver Business Journal

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TelecityGroup has announced its results for the year ended 31 December 2010.

Highlights include: Revenue up 15.9% to £196.4 million (2009: £169.4million), with constant currency revenue growth of 17.7% and adjusted profit before tax up 45.0% to £51.4 million (2009: £35.4 million). In addition, Total announced customer power up to 107MW and £200 million five-year senior debt facility arranged in the year

Source: TelecityGroup
 

Dupont Fabros Technology, whose data centres house Internet servers in Northern Virginia and California, reported profits for its latest quarter compared to a loss a year ago. The company’s fourth quarter revenue rose more than 25% to US$66 million. Dupont Fabros raised US$179 million in a preferred stock offering last fall on top of a US$305 million secondary stock offering earlier in the year. It is using the proceeds to fund data centre expansion and reduce debt.

CSC has reported third quarter fiscal 2011 revenue of US$4.01 billion compared to third quarter fiscal 2010 revenue of US$3.95 billion. The year to date revenue was US$11.93 billion compared to the year to date fiscal 2010 revenue of US$11.89 billion.

Operating cash flow was $462 million for the quarter, as compared to $131 million from the previous year. For the year to date, operating cash flow was $804 million compared to $407 million from the previous year.

Source: PYMNTS

Portugal Telecom has chosen Covilha as the headquarters of its biggest data centre in Portugal. The 45,000 sq m centre will support storage and cloud services for business and consumer customers.

Powered by an adjacent wind farm, the data centre will offer capacity for around 50,000 servers. It is expected to enter service in the second half of 2012, doubling the capacity of data centres in Portugal.

Source: Telecom Paper

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, has reported quarterly and year-end results for the period ended December 31, 2010.

Revenues were US$345.2 million for the fourth quarter, a 5% increase over the previous quarter and 42% over the same quarter last year. Revenues for the year ended December 31, 2010, were US$1,220.3 million, a 38% increase over 2009 revenues. This result included US$57.9 million in revenues from Switch and Data for the quarter and US$153.0 million in revenues from Switch and Data for the year ended December 31, 2010.

NBN Co has decided to locate its second national data centre within the state-of-the-art Polaris facility at Springfield in Queensland. The contract was awarded despite NBN Co earmarking Melbourne as the location for its second data centre in September last year.

The deal represented another high-profile customer addition to the five-storey, US$241 million Polaris data centre facility located south-west of Brisbane's CBD. The centre already counted NEC, Suncorp, Citec and HP among its other major clients.

Source: IT News

DuPont Fabros Technology plans to invest about US$180 million to build out the rest of the former Enesco building in Elk Grove Village and lease it to Internet and data centre companies by next year, the chief financial officer said.

Colocation and data centre operator PAETEC Holding has announced it will acquire XETA Technologies for about US$61 million. XETA Technologies sells, installs and services "advanced communication technologies for enterprise customers," including voice, data, networking and application services. The company has 32 locations and 24-hour customer contact and data network operating centres.

XETA's products and services will become part of PAETEC's managed services portfolio, consisting of products such as hosted services, service lifecycle management software and Allworx IP-PBXs.

Rackspace saw its cloud revenue hit the stratosphere during the fourth quarter of 2010, according to its financial results just issued. The managed hosting and cloud provider reported “cloud revenue” of US$31.4 million during the quarter, up approximately 83.4% year over year, bringing the company’s total 2010 cloud revenue to US$100.7 million. Perhaps more telling about the future of Rackspace’s business, though, is the increasing percentage of overall revenue attributed to cloud computing.

Start-up data centre operator NextDC says plans for its first three data centres in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane are on track except for delay in getting power to its Brisbane centre because of Energex's flood damage restoration priorities.

Atlanta-based T5 Partners has picked Alpharetta as then site of a US$75 million data centre.

The 103,000 sq ft building, expected to open in November, will be among the five largest data centres in the region. The data centre, located on 12 acres, will include 54,000 sq ft of "raised space" — the area where servers and other computer equipment is housed.

Source: Atlanta Business Chronicle

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It will take the Social Security Administration at least until mid 2016 to build a new data centre to safely handle and store nearly 500,000 electronic records that determine benefits. Meanwhile, the agency's current data centre is in danger of "catastrophic failure," government officials told two congressional subcommittees.

A Sunday post on the Forbes blog quotes Lanham Napier, CEO of hosting provider Rackspace as saying the company is “not for sale,” in the wake of some speculation around further consolidation in the hosting business.

Napier told Forbes that Rackspace’s strategy is to “build the service leader” in the hosting space, and that plan does not involve being acquired, or buying other companies as a means of acquiring scale. He says – as Rackspace has often said – that the company feels its competitive advantage is its culture, with all the “fanatical support” and “rackers” that entails.

Even as Congress discussed budget cuts, U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra told attendees of the Cloud Security Alliance Summit that rethinking technology could save taxpayers billions of dollars. The plan, as Kundra explained it, is to close hundreds of data centres run by government agencies and move computing services into the “cloud” – the vast, ever-growing network of Internet-based computers and storage servers.

Capitals west and south have emerged as likely candidates to locate Kaspersky’s next Australian data centre. The Russian anti-virus vendor has two colocated facilities in Sydney but its interstate expansion will depend on hitting a critical mass of 20,000 to 25,000 users at the chosen site, said Kaspersky’s cloud services director for Asia-Pacific Bernie Bengler.

Dell.’s shares jumped in late trading after fourth-quarter profit topped estimates and the company made headway in the market for data centres. Excluding some costs, profit was 53 cents in the quarter, which ended Jan. 28, Round Rock, Texas-based Dell said..

Shrinking UK public sector contracts contributed to the mixed year-end results announced today by IT services giant Atos Origin. And Atos still has some mountains to climb, say industry analysts, not least in moving from nationally based to global delivery models, and in integrating Siemens IT Solutions and Services, which the firm agreed to acquire on 1 February.

The group's overall operating margin of €337 million was up to 6.7% of revenue in 2010, compared with 5.7% in 2009. But that was on revenues of €5,021million, a decline of 3.5% on last year.

Source: Computing

Cincinnati Bell has announced financial results for the full year and fourth quarter of 2010. For the year, revenue was US$1.4 billion, an increase of 3% from 2009. Operating income for 2010 was US$299 million and net income of US$28 million

Starting in the fourth quarter of 2010, the Technology Solutions segment was split into the Data Center Colocation segment and the IT Services and Hardware segment.

Source: Sun Herald

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CyrusOne, a data centre colocation provider, has earned an LEED@ Silver Certification established by the US Green Building Council (USGBC) and verified by the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI) for the environmentally friendly design of its West Houston Data Centre, located along the North West Beltway between Interstate I-10 and Highway 290.

Irish managed services company Hibernia Evros has invested €1.6 million in a new cloud computing division that will create 50 jobs over the next three years. The new division, which has already signed a number of customers, provides computing on demand to allow companies of all sizes to outsource fully their entire IT infrastructure requirements.

A Tennessee Valley Authority economic development initiative has identified a Nashville site as the latest of 14 prime locations for developing the region's data centre industry.

The Starwood Commons site, located at Murfreesboro Road and Hobson Pike/Old Hickory Boulevard in south eastern Davidson County, has been certified as a top location for building and operating a data centre facility.

Source: PR Newswire

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China Telecom plans to triple the number of users for its fibre-optic broadband service this year to reach 30 million. The company further aims to grow the user base to 100 million by the end of China's twelfth Five-Year Plan (2011-2015).

HP Enterprise Services has won US$281 million, seven-year contract extension with the state to continue providing health care IT services. The service agreement with the Oklahoma Health Care Authority adds new information technology services to help the state prepare for health care reform and make services more accessible to SoonerCare members.

BT, the global communications and IT services company, has announced a major broadband investment that will cement Northern Ireland's position at the forefront of the fibre broadband revolution in Europe by March 2012. The investment is part of BT Group's £2.5 billion fibre roll-out in the UK.

After releasing a lacklustre profit announcement, Australian-based managed services player Melbourne IT has outed plans for data centre investment and consolidation before the year is out. In its results presentation, Melbourne IT announced a plan to expand its data centre footprint in late 2011 to cater for "customer growth" and perhaps some consolidation of existing infrastructure.

Interxion, a European provider of carrier-neutral colocation data centre services, has completed the second of three phased expansions to its ZUR1 data centre in Zurich-Glattbrugg, in response to consistent growth in customer demand. 640m2 of new data centre space was created in the expansion, which increases total data centre space to over 4000m2.

Online video website PPTV has raised US$250 million to grow content and set up a data centre, the company has said

Japan-based Softbank is one of PPTV's investors. The Beijing-based firm's development plan in 2011 includes a super-scaled, highly concurrent and reliable video cloud data centre, an open and professional releasing platform for videos and more popular and legal contents, according to Yao Xin, president and founder of PPTV.

Source: Shanghai Daily

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The National Roads Authority has withdrawn objections to plans for one of the world’s largest data centres at Newtownmountkennedy in Co Wicklow. The authority’s decision to drop objections to the proposed €1 billion development came after a strong local campaign that included assurances from Wicklow County Council on improvements to a junction on the N11.

CBRE reports on the role of incentives in data centre site selection in a recent report. Incentives are critical in the location decision, writes study author John Lenio. But taxes and incentives often enter the picture late in the decision process. Prime site selection factors for data centres, such as environment and weather and overall power costs, still come first.

Goldman Sachs has invested $70 million (£43 million) in British “user virtualisation” software and services vendor AppSense. The Cheshire-based company sells technology that allows customers to create and manage user profiles, based on the virtualised applications, desktops and servers they need to access.

Approval has been given for a huge data storage facility which could create dozens of jobs. Construction of the Lloyds TSB data centre on the outskirts of Darlington could also involve between 600 and 1,000 workers. Members of Darlington Borough Council's planning committee heard that if the data centre is constructed at the site at Whessoe Grange Farm it could establish the town as a leading area in the field of data storage and create a number of secondary employment opportunities.

Macquarie Telecom’s hosting business continues to be one of the telco’s major profit contributors with the company posting an increase of 102% on net profits after tax of A$9.7 million for the half year to 31 December 2010. "The company is experiencing increased demand for its hosting services due to the growing trend of selective outsourcing of internal information technology," Macquarie Telecom chief executive, David Tudehope, said.

The Scott Data Center is logged in and prepared to begin construction on an expansion and renovation plan that will make the Omaha centre one of the most powerful and energy-efficient operations of its type in the Midlands.

Cable & Wireless Communications is selling its operations in Bermuda to a family-run Canadian cable and telecommunications company in a US$70 million deal. Once the sale to The Braggs Group gets government and regulatory approvals, it’s expected to be finalised by the end of next month, at which time the new owners say they’ll keep the same employees and local management.

Colt Group has issued results for the 12 months ended 31 December 2010. Highlights included

* Solid EBITDA performance on improved revenue mix
* Significant growth in portfolio of cloud based services
* Strong new partnerships with technology leaders
* Launched ground-breaking, state-of-the-art modular data centre
* Restructuring on course to deliver €20m of net annualised savings

Internap Network Services, a provider of IT infrastructure services, has announced financial results for the fourth quarter and full-year 2010.

Highlights included: Highest profitability in company history (adjusted EBITDA of US$39.2 million); Expansion of company-controlled data centre space by 30,000 net sellable sq ft (26% growth); and record data centre services segment profit of US$45.4 million, up 27% and segment margin up 810 basis points.

Source: Digital Journal

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A coalition of businesses lobbying lawmakers for new incentives to lure data centres to Missouri is hoping the third time will be the charm. Since lawmakers declined to approve incentives last year, the Missouri Department of Economic Development has identified data centres as a targeted growth industry, said Ora Reynolds, president of Hunt Midwest Real Estate Development Inc.

Reynolds said the Hunt Midwest Subtropolis complex lost a bid for a national data centre client last year because of a lack of available state incentives.

Source: Kansas City Business Journal

UK based data centre consultants Capitoline have set up a new company based in the United Arab Emirates to take advantage of the growing need for high quality engineering consultancy services in the Gulf area and India.

The new company, Capitoline FZC, is a joint venture between Capitoline LLP of the UK and local partners and will offer Capitoline’s services of audits, design and training for data centre and computer room projects. In the summer the company will work out of new prestigious offices in Dubai.

Source: PR Log