This morning Zayo announced the closing of its purchase of Latisys, and along with it came a reconfiguration of the company’s management team to reflect the growing influence of the data center side of its business.
The purchase of Latisys more than doubled Zayo’s billable square footage, now 503,000 square feet, brought it into several new Tier I markets, and gave the company a new foothold out in the cloud. zColo had been pretty tightly aimed at metro interconnection, but that focus has clearly widened somewhat into more general colo and cloud infrastructure services.
The cloud business will be folded into Zayo’s Lit Services division, which will now be called Zayo Cloud & Connectivity. Chris Morley will move to Lit Services from his position as President of Sales. Stephanie Copeland will move over from Lit Services to take the helm of zColo. Glen Russo will take over the role of President of Sales & Service. And zColo’s Greg Friedman will move over as VP of the Cloud strategic product group. The names remain the same, but lots of new titles. Zayo is clearly pivoting to a new, slightly different stance — as it has done pretty frequently over the course of the company’s rapid evolution.
I do wonder how deep into the data center and cloud worlds Zayo will be delving. But actually I’ve also wondered why we haven’t seen the inverse happen, i.e. why so few of the larger data center operators have delved into the dark fiber world. The two are so tightly linked nowadays, and they aren’t all that different in the way they spend capital and sell long term infrastructure contracts.
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Categories: Datacenter · Mergers and Acquisitions · Metro fiber
Telx and Lightower are in the Berkshire Partners portfolio
Solid players, all. Good luck!