Contact: Scott Denne Kelly Morgan
Private equity firm GI Partners picks up Peak 10 for a purchase price that’s likely $750-850m. The final price is below where we heard it was initially being shopped, but is about two times what Welsh Carson Anderson & Stowe paid for the datacenter business in 2010.
The acquisition is GI Partners’ largest takeout of a datacenter business. The firm’s wagers in the space have ticked up since its acquisition in 2006 of Telx, which it sold five years later to ABRY Partners. The purchase of Peak 10 comes on the eve of the anniversary of IBM’s acquisition of GI Partners’ portfolio company SoftLayer for $2bn in 2013. GI bought SoftLayer in 2010 for about one-quarter of that price.
Now, all eyes will be on GI to see if it combines Peak 10 with ViaWest, which it has a minority interest in. Geographically, the two would fit together nicely and both target SMB customers with colocation plus cloud and managed services. Peak 10 is based in the southeastern US and has been steadily expanding its datacenter footprint while also adding to its services. ViaWest provides similar services from its locations in Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Texas and Utah.
For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.