Interesting to see today’s news that Pulsant has acquired Edinburgh’s Scolocate for £26m, so building on Lumison’s longstanding presence in the Scottish capital.
Scolocate has been majority owned by The Royal Bank of Scotland since 2002 following a financial restructuring.
Scolocate History
Scolocate is an important regional hub facility in the UK data centre market. Having opened in early 2000 at the height of the dot-com boom, Scolocate was able to capture points of presence from many telcos expanding their nationwide footprints. Even today, after significant consolidation in the UK network industry over the past few years the Scolocate website still lists nearly 30 carriers and ISPs as customers in the company’s 75,000 sq ft data centre, making the Scolocate site an strategic carrier neutral hub facility in the regional UK data centre market and obviously of even greater relative importance to the national Scottish market. In a way, Scolocate can be considered the “Telehouse” of Scotland.
Pulsant now offering 240,000 sq ft across 10 sites
The Scolocate acquisition adds further capacity to the rapidly expanding Pulsant Group and whilst clearly a close fit with the original Lumison data centre a little further west in Edinburgh, the new site adds to the company’s colocation footprint in Milton Keynes and Croydon, both of which have also recently undergone significant expansion and investment. Pulsant also has the former Dedipower data centres in Reading and Blue Square sites in Maidenhead but you can clearly see now the focus on Croydon (or “South London” as Pulsant seem to prefer) and Milton Keynes as the larger sites looking forward, with perhaps Reading being more focussed on managed hosting services as opposed to colocation. Pulstant now claim some 240,000 sq ft of data centre capacity across 10 data centres – a useful summary of which can be found on their website: http://bit.ly/UCKTrR
Possible areas of concern
Keeping the carrier neutral ethos in place in Scolocate will clearly by key factor for existing customers, some of whom may by somewhat uncomfortable that their colocation provider has now been acquired by a potential competitor, especially as far as the local managed services market goes. It will be interesting to see if the Scolocate brand survives but I suppose reassuring to read the existing management team and staff are being kept in situ. Furthermore, there has been some long standing uncertainty regarding the Royal Bank’s ownership of Scolocate, colocation hardly being a core business for the bank, so at least this has now finally been put to rest.
Footnote
In response to our comment above about carrier neutrality, Pulsant have sent us the following reassuring statement from CEO Mark Howling regarding Scolocate:
“Being carrier neutral is incredibly important to us. In fact, the rich range of telecoms providers that are connected to Scolocate’s data centre was a major part of the decision to acquire the company. This datacentre is the best-connected outside the M25, so not only will we continue to offer the benefits of carrier neutrality to Scolocate’s customers, but we will also be able to offer a greater choice to customers in our nine other data centres.”