TelecityGroup

» see telecitygroup.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Telecity sold floor space with power behind it, and the right to plug into whoever else was already in the room. Mike Kelly and Anish Kapoor, both out of Manchester University, started it there in April 1998 with £24 million from 3i behind them and opened their first data center in the city. A separate company, Redbus Interhouse, was incorporated three months later and opened in London Docklands in 1999. Both of them floated in London during 2000, in the window where that was still easy.

The group that died in 2016 was those two plus a third. 3i and Oak Hill took Telecity private in September 2005, put a new holding company over it, bought Redbus in January 2006 to create TelecityRedbus, and then bought the European assets of the American hosting company Globix later the same year. In August 2007 the three names were retired into one, TelecityGroup, and in October the result went back onto the London market. From there it bought data centers steadily: Manchester again, Dublin, Helsinki twice, Istanbul, Sofia.

Equinix announced it would buy the whole thing in May 2015, the European Commission cleared the purchase on 13 November on condition that eight sites were sold off, and the deal closed on 15 January 2016 at a value of about $3.8 billion. Equinix said it had more than doubled its capacity in Europe that morning. The eight divested sites went to Digital Realty for $874 million, and the Telecity name came off the buildings afterward.

~ the record ~

~ forty rooms in twelve cities ~

The site list at the end reads like an inventory of where the European internet physically was. Eight in London, including Sovereign House and the Harbour Exchange pair in Docklands and the old Powergate building in Acton. Six in Amsterdam, five in Helsinki, four each in Dublin and Manchester, three in Milan and three in Paris, two in Frankfurt, two in Stockholm, two in Warsaw, one in Sofia, one in Istanbul. The count is given as 37 in most write-ups, that published city list adds up to 41, and Equinix said it was taking on more than 40, so call it forty rooms. At the end of 2011 the company could deliver 68 megawatts to customers and was building toward roughly double that.

Those rooms mattered for their cross-connects more than for their square footage. A carrier-neutral building is one where any network can meet any other network with a cable rather than a contract, and a handful of Telecity's London and Amsterdam halls were where a large share of that meeting happened. If you loaded a page in Europe in 2012, there is a fair chance some part of the route ran through a cage the company rented out by the rack.

~ the istanbul room ~

In May 2013 Telecity bought SadeceHosting, a hosting and data center operator in Istanbul, and from then until the end it ran exactly one site in Turkey. That was the whole Turkish footprint of Europe's largest colocation company: one room, against eight in London and six in Amsterdam. Istanbul spent those years being described as the meeting point between European and Middle Eastern networks, and what the description bought was a single acquired hosting company, owned for under three years and then handed on with the rest of the group.

~ the deal that got called off ~

In February 2015 Telecity and Interxion announced they would merge. Telecity would buy its Dutch rival for about $2.2 billion, the combination would be worth roughly $4.5 billion, and the two chief executives talked about $600 million of savings. It was presented as the European answer to the American consolidators. Three months later Equinix, the largest of those consolidators, bid for Telecity and the Interxion merger was terminated.

Michael Tobin, who had run the group through most of the expansion, had already left in August 2014 after reported tensions with the board. Read back from here, the last two years are a sequence of transactions rather than a business: a merger agreed and dropped, a competition review, eight buildings carved out and sold to a third party, then a closing date. The hardware never stopped. Only the name on the front did, which is the normal way a data center company dies.

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