UIS Acquiring Data Center Space in Dallas

Unified Infrastructure Services, a significant new player in the Dallas data center market, has signed a lease for 22,000 square feet of space at a Digital Realty Trust (DLR) building in Carrollton, Texas. Unified Infrastructure said its eight-year lease of Turn-Key Datacenter space at 4025 Midway Road was valued at $35 million.

The deal follows UIS' purchase of 2020 Live Oak, a carrier hotel in downtown Dallas, and gives the company more than 200,000 square feet of available data center space in the Dallas market. The purchase price for 2020 Live Oak wasn't disclosed, but local reports said the property had doubled in value over the course of three sales in the past 12 months.

UIS says it also has purchased a 30,000 square foot Dallas data center property "currently occupied by a large Internet company." All three deals took place within a three-week span in late November and early December, according to the UIS news page. Lance Smith, who previously worked with ACS and Atos Origin, joined UIS in October as its vice president of operations.

UIS' buying spree is designed to capitalize on demand in the Dallas data center market, which has seen a flurry of deals in the past eight months. Dataside recently announced plans to build a fifth data center in the Dallas market, while Databank, Securus, Skyrise Properties and Behringer Harvard have all acquired data center space in Dallas since last summer.

"UIS has been growing rapidly because our managed services meet the needs of under-served customers: companies that have outgrown the limited services of hosting companies but who are not large enough to devote major budgets to working with the big outsourced IT companies," said Ramon A. Guerra Jr., CEO of UIS. "Demand for our services has been very strong, and this new datacenter allows us to respond quickly to that demand. Being able to establish a new datacenter so quickly and without leveraging our own capital is a huge market advantage for us."

The Carrollton lease is the latest in a series of wins for Digital Realty's Turn-Key Datacenter space program, which offers finished data center space to tenants, allowing them to move in and quickly bring a facility online.

"Speed to market is critical for a company like UIS that is responding to strong demand for its datacenter services," said Chris Crosby, Senior Vice President of Digital Realty Trust. "Our Turn-Key Datacenter facilities provide true move-in-ready space with the technical features, power and flexibility to quickly establish new datacenters. Time is definitely money for these projects, and our Turn-Key Datacenter solution dramatically decreases the time needed to complete a datacenter expansion."

UIS, which is part of the Unified Group of companies, indicated that it will continue to acquire space. "This is our first lease for space in a Digital Realty Trust facility, but it will not be the last," said Smith.