Cloud a growing focus in BLACKIRON Data's datacenter business

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1 Cloud a growing focus in BLACKIRON Data's datacenter business Analyst: Liam Eagle 9 Apr, 2013 With a 15-year history in the multi-tenant datacenter space, Canadian provider BLACKIRON Data is a colocation business first and foremost. However, it is an example of the growing trend of datacenter players evolving up the service stack into the cloud business. Like many datacenter companies historically focused on space and power, BLACKIRON is building an emerging business around public and private cloud, and in the process uncovering the role of cloud among a larger set of datacenter services, in both the immediate and long term. BLACKIRON's cloud services offering is a means of meeting certain customer needs today, but it's also a long-term move that sets the company up to address a significant future need for cloud services among its current colocation customers. Context BLACKIRON Data is the result of a series of moves over the last year designed to refocus Primus Telecommunications Canada's datacenter business on serving the Canadian market with a consultative set of IT outsourcing services. In Q1 2012, Primus sold off its Primus Australia business for roughly $200 million, isolating its datacenter footprint within Canada's borders, and refocusing its datacenter business on that market. In October, the company re-branded Primus Business Services as BLACKIRON Data. It operates eight facilities in five Canadian cities, including Vancouver, Edmonton, London (Ontario), two in Ottawa and three in the Toronto area, including its recently launched DC3 in Markham, which received Tier III Certification for design and construction from The Uptime Institute (an independent division of The 451 Group). BLACKIRON indicates that the distinction of offering infrastructure as a service based inside Canada has helped to drive growth in the cloud portion of its business. Following the brand split, Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 BLACKIRON generated $9 million (Canadian dollars) in revenue during Q4 2012, and saw 65% year-over-year growth in its cloud business, compared with 15% for its (much larger) colocation business and 14% overall. BLACKIRON currently has about 240 employees. Technology/product BLACKIRON's public cloud is mature among colocation-focused datacenter companies shifting toward cloud. The company began building its cloud in 2008, launched it publicly in 2009 and released a new version in October A key for BLACKIRON is delivering what it calls a 'production grade' cloud, a distinction it bases on the quality of the components, and an emphasis on performance and control. The product is currently built on VMware virtualization technology (including vcloud Director), Hewlett-Packard server hardware and NetApp storage components. Control is addressed through the company's portal. BLACKIRON's cloud uses a portal designed and built in-house to let customers manage cloud infrastructure and account settings, create, resize and reboot individual VMs and manage virtual datacenter environments. The portal also lets users manage bandwidth, IP addresses and cloud firewalls, and provides access to vcloud Director for initial provisioning and other functions. The company has placed support for additional hypervisors and Cisco's Flexpod architecture on its roadmap for BLACKIRON says it puts a premium on innovating at the portal level, and claims to have engineered several functions that were later introduced by VMware as components of vcloud Director, including the ability for customers to control IOPS at the VM level, and enabling the use of multiple storage profiles on the back end of a virtualized environment. The cloud product lets users run up to 64 gigabytes of RAM on a single VM. Compute is priced per GB of RAM, and assigned CPU at a ratio of one per GB of RAM. Disk is priced separately. BLACKIRON's cloud environments include a Cloud Firewall, based on Astaro, for free. Users can pay extra for its unified threat management functions. Business model BLACKIRON delivers all its services through a consultative on-boarding approach. Its professional services organization offers IT strategy consulting and a 'virtual CIO' product designed to provide outsourced IT strategy and management. Its public cloud product is billed monthly, rather than on a utility basis. This is a reflection of Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 customer need, according to BLACKIRON, which indicates that while customers do see changes in demand, they tend to be more sustained, as in the case of a several-months increase in usage during tax season. The company intends to introduce a utility-billed offering in the near future for testing and development, and other workloads customers are currently turning to Amazon to address. While BLACKIRON has business from outside Canada (US-based SaaS providers with Canadian customers, for example), the vast majority of its business comes from within the country. BLACKIRON does not have an international strategy today. Average monthly revenue for a public cloud user is $1,000. The private cloud average is much higher, although the company did not disclose a specific number. Strategy How cloud fits into the overall IT needs of its customers is a big part of BLACKIRON's strategy. Colocation continues to be the significant bulk of its business. Although the potential to generate revenue on per-cabinet basis is exponentially higher with cloud than with traditional colocation, the company says it is not motivated to push prospective customers into the cloud. BLACKIRON believes that cloud is on every CTO's roadmap, even if it is still a few years down the road. Ultimately, the company expects all its customers to explore cloud strategies of some kind, and it believes they will choose BLACKIRON as a supplier, based on the success of their colocation relationships. The company suggests the hardware life cycle is a significant driver of interest in cloud resources among customers currently in colocation environments. BLACKIRON does not break down revenue by vertical, although the company indicates it is in the process of developing a vertical approach to the market. Its focus on compliance in the colocation space has resonated with the verticals for which compliance is most significant, so the company does have a strong presence among healthcare and financial services customers. The cloud environment was designed to meet standards for PCI compliance, and the company says it intends to pursue PCI certification for its cloud environment during Competition With a datacenter presence across Canada and a particular focus on the Toronto market BLACKIRON competes with a broad spectrum of multi-tenant datacenter players, including major Canadian players like Q9 Networks (owned by Bell Canada) and Cogeco Data Services and Cologix Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 as well as international players like Equinix and Level 3 Communications. The colocation-plus-cloud competition is a smaller field that includes PEER 1 (now owned by Cogeco), CentriLogic and Savvis. The 451 Take The move to separate BLACKIRON rightly identified the datacenter services business as separate from the telecommunications business. With a successful quarter under its belt, BLACKIRON is developing an integrated strategy around the intersection of cloud and colocation. While its cloud is a mature and compelling product, it is a comparatively small contributor to the business' overall revenue. BLACKIRON is looking at cloud as a long-range play that will hold increasing appeal for its colocation customers over the coming years, as they face the prospect of replacing dying hardware, and seek out other efficiencies. In the meantime, BLACKIRON is wisely positioning itself as a valuable and capable technology partner, a position that is likely to be supported by the operating of its Tier III-certified facility in the Toronto area. Copyright The 451 Group 4

5 Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; This report was originally published within 451 Research s Daily T1R. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: Copyright The 451 Group 5