Happy holidays! As the countdown to 2020 draws ever closer, we wanted to take this opportunity to thank all our customers, partners and friends, for joining us on our journey to extend hyperscale, cloud and carrier-neutral data center solutions across Canada.
Reflecting on the year behind us, we can honestly say that 2019 has been a whirlwind year. Ever since January got under way, our entire team has been on a continuous sprint, fully dedicated to delivering on our promise of giving our customers more: more choice of locations, capacity and network connections. So, before we all take a well-deserved break to enjoy the upcoming holidays, we’d like to give you the highlight reel of the year that was 2019.
Unstoppable
If we could distill the month of January into a single word, it would have to be UNSTOPPABLE. Within a week, between January 15 and 21, we not only announced the expansion of our VAN-1 data center in the Mount Pleasant area, but we also unveiled the acquisition of a second Vancouver facility in the Greater Vancouver municipality of Burnaby. You can imagine how thrilled we were to add another data center in the city aptly dubbed the “Gateway to the Pacific”. VAN-2 more than triples the amount of server cabinet space we have in the area and covers 54,000 square feet. How’s that for a data center size in a market known for tight real estate?
As the year progressed, driven by the same feeling of being unstoppable, we focused our attention to the ecosystem of channel partners, as an important vehicle for extending our reach to new industries and territories. Any service provider knows that channel partners are a vital for business growth. That’s why, after months of trialing partnership models, we formally launched our Channel Partner Program in July. Designed to facilitate easier access to our data center services, we’ve been able to cultivate a vibrant ecosystem of sales agents, resellers and service providers. All our partners have one thing in common – a desire to help their end-users find the best in scalable, customizable colocation and connectivity solutions.
Truly Different Service
Naturally, a successful channel partner program requires the right level of enablement and support for the partners. Keeping in mind that the ultimate goal is to create more value for the end customer, we built a robust partnership program that makes selling our services simple and profitable. Moreover, perfectly timed for the partner program launch, we had the pleasure of bringing on board Jaime Leverton, our Chief Commercial Officer and SVP who was also inducted into the ITWC’s Women in the IT Channel Hall of Fame. With critical experience in building and scaling high-performing sales organizations, Jaime has added huge value to eStruxture by leveraging her extensive knowledge of technology solutions to help us develop new, strategic partnerships.
Speaking of customer service, we’ve always stood by our mission to bring our brand and services across our Canadian landscape. After establishing a presence in Quebec and British Columbia, it was clearly time to look at bridging the geographic gap. Of course, having a strong balance sheet is critical to being able to expand. Fortunately, in June, we were able to announce an additional $170 million in new capital from a group of leading Canadian financial institutions. This financial boost will help support our long-term growth strategy.
By far, one of our proudest moments this year was the announcement of the Shaw Communication’s Calgary data center acquisition. This acquisition immediately made us the largest Canadian-owned carrier-neutral data center provider and marked our first step eastwards from Vancouver back to Montreal. This new facility as well as our ability to help customers create any combination of networks, data centers and cloud onramps they need is helping us attract new business to our CAL-1 facility.
Tis the Season for Celebrations
With all the acquisitions and strategic partnerships of the year, you might think we are always in the office or the boardroom. Not so! At eStruxture, we like a good celebration, too. And this past October, we gathered the who’s who of the Quebec data center sector to formally launch our MTL-2 data center. When we acquired the property in 2017, it was a defunct printing press. Now, it is a state-of-the-art, environmentally sustainable data center with the capacity and connections to support our customers as they grow. At our launch party, we celebrated two years of hard work and dedication with the teams that made it all possible, including our vendors and partners.
We also held a customer appreciation Open House event in our Calgary facility on November 15th where we hosted all of our customers and partners for an evening of great food and great conversations.
In addition to that, we also took part in many important events this year, from PTC’19 in Hawaii and International Telecoms Week in Atlanta, Global Women in Telco & Tech in London, UK (where our CEO was nominated for the Agent of Change Award and spoke about the importance of advocating for gender diversity) to Digital Infra Montreal and DCD’s Canada Digital Week Webinar series, to name just a few. The last two of these really stand out for us in terms of our message.
At Digital Infra, we made a clear business case for going green. By installing environmentally-sound equipment that, in some cases, has a longer lifespan than its legacy equivalents, data center operators can lower their Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratios and enjoy more savings in the long run.
Finally, during the DCD Webinar series, our CEO, Todd Coleman, talked about how eStruxture delivers its data center products and services at speed and scale in today’s world. He noted that hyperscale providers in the wholesale market often cannot predict their demand. In our experience, many customers look for quick turn up of additional megawatts within strict timeframes. To do this, data center providers need capital, ready-to-implement design plans and pre-ordered equipment that normally requires longer lead times. And this is precisely what we have – the wherewithal to deliver what our customers need, when they need it. If you want to know more, just ask us!
#weareestruxture
2019 also brought us a expanded eStruxture family. From support team to operations, sales and product management, many professionals have joined our team in order to bring their knowlede and expertise to our ever-growing customer base and we couldn't be more proud to have them on our side.
Into the New Year
With 2019 almost in the books, we can proudly say we’ve had a fantastic year. And because it’s in our nature to strive for more, we’re already looking to top that in 2020 - but that’s going to be an adventure we take together. Just remember, for colocation, network, cloud and managed services, we’re the data center company that always gives you more!
If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you in 2020, contact us!
Happy holidays and may you have an exciting, happy year ahead.