TeraGo Acquires Former BlackBerry Data Center In Toronto Area

Telecom TeraGo has acquired a former BlackBerry-managed data center in Mississauga, Ontario, its fourth acquisition in the last two years. The company has been expanding its data center footprint in Canada and now operates around 40,000 square feet of data center space.

TeraGo is another telecom getting deeper into cloud services in order to diversify revenue with business friendly data center services. It is primarily known for wireless services. The national service provider owns and manages its IP network serving over 4,100 business customers in major markets across Canada.

The 10,000-square-foot data center has close to 5 megawatts of power, an immense amount for its size, suggesting BlackBerry operated it at high density. The former enterprise data center was designed with N+2 availability of generators and has room for 1,600 square feet of expansion.

This is TeraGo’s second data center in Greater Toronto, joining another in Vaughan. It started building out its data center footprint and kicked off an acquisition spree by purchasing the Vaughan facility in May 2013. It acquired its first downtown Vancouver data center in February of this year, followed by a third acquisition and data center in Vancouver a month later.

The company said the facility is in support of growing cloud services. A recent study by TechNavio said that Canada’s cloud computing market will grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of close to 18 percent between 2013-2018.

"This unique, high power facility was important for us to add to our footprint as we have seen a vast increase in the amount of power required to service individual customers," said Stewart Lyons, CEO and President of TeraGo. "Customers are focusing more and more on high density server capability and this site will future proof us in this regard. It's the perfect site from which to grow our cloud computing environment."

Research In Motion (RIM) and BlackBerry have struggled since the introduction of the iPhone and additional competition from Android. In terms of data centers, the BlackBerry name has appeared in the past thanks to highly public outages. There were outages in 2007, 2008, 2011 and 2011 again. The very criticized outages prompted the company to boost its infrastructure.

While this data center has nothing to do with the outages, its fate might have been sealed because of them. Several years removed and off of its peak, the hit to its market share might be one reason BlackBerry is shedding this data center, as it looks to become operationally lean and resize itself. This means TeraGo is able to pick up high-density enterprise-grade space in a key Canadian market.