Beyond.pl Opening $27M Data Center in Poland

Polish IT company Beyond.pl is planning to open a 65,000-square-foot data center in Poznań, a city in west central Poland. The data center is expected to cost about $27 million without the cost of equipment and will employ about 50 people, once it opens in March.

The facility will be one of the largest colocation data centers in Poland and a major expansion for Beyond.pl. The company's single current data center has only about 8,500 square feet of equipment space.

The company is already accepting customers and hopes the facility to be one-quarter full by the time it comes online. It will be fed by two independent power sources, providing the building with 14 megawatts total.

The European Regional Development Fund provided approximately $8.1 million worth of funding to the project.

Beyond.pl offers business IT infrastructure services, employing about 100 people. The company was founded in 2005 and opened its first carrier-neutral colocation data center in 2007.

Beyond.pl also runs an Information and Technology Research Center.

While Europe as a whole has enjoyed a growing data center and cloud industry, Eastern European countries generally lag behind their western counterparts. Poland is one of the more developed countries when it comes to data center infrastructure but is still considered an emerging market.

Nevertheless, it is a key market in Eastern Europe. Including growth within the country, many nearby European businesses view Poland as a logical first entry point into serving central and eastern European markets. Global consulting company PMR Research believes Poland make up one-fifth of the total central and eastern European market.

Other colocation providers in Poland include Varion, TeliaSonera, and Thinx, a subsidiary of ATM S.A. Thinx operates the Atman data center, which expanded last July. The facility has around 40,000 square feet of equipment space.

TelecityGroup acquired PLIX internet exchange and its well-connected colo facility in Warsaw in 2013. Telecity cited Poland’s market potential as rationale behind the deal. The London-based service provider also acquired 3DC in Bulgaria in a bigger Eastern European play.

In 2013, IBM launched a 14,000-square-foot data center in Blonie, west of Warsaw.

Multi-cloud platform provider OnApp noted in 2013 that Poland was an emerging market for it as well.

Although it resides in Montreal, Canada, OVH’s 10,000 server containers were designed in Poland.