TierPoint Buys Florida Data Center Provider CxP

Data center services provider TierPoint has been a company on the move recently. Less than a week ago, the St. Louis-based company announced that Jerry Kent would take over the helm as CEO from Paul Estes, who will remain with TierPoint in a different capacity.

Perhaps best known as the owner of Suddenlink, a cable company he sold a few months ago for $9.1 billion to European telecom Altice SA, Kent had been overseeing TierPoint as chairman since a group of investors acquired the St. Louis-based company last year.

On the heels of that personnel shift, today TierPoint announced the expansion of its national data center footprint with a Florida data center through an acquisition of Jacksonville-based CxP Data Centers.

At 121,000 square feet, it is the largest colocation facility in northeast Florida and will include approximately 65,000 additional square feet of data center space once fully built out, according to the company. The building is designed to be hurricane-resistant and is ballistic-hardened. Its location, within hundreds of yards of the main fiber-optic lines that serve Florida makes it attractive for companies planning disaster recovery and business continuity.

The Florida data center, which reopened in March of 2014, was renovated to include a state-of-the-art Network Operations Center and Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity space. In addition, it is capable of supporting a wide range of computing densities for cloud and managed hosting services.

The CxP acquisition is precisely what TierPoint hoped would happen following its own buyout. As CEO at the time, Estes spoke of only positive changes on the horizon.

"Our new financial partners bring a long-term orientation and expertise in building high-growth communications businesses," he said in a statement. "With their involvement and this recapitalization we are well-positioned to continue investing in our infrastructure, technologies and people. We plan to acquire additional strategically sound assets and continue building TierPoint into an industry-leading company."

Although this is the eighth acquistion for TierPoint -- the largest being Xand in December 2014 -- the CxP deal is still a big step toward meeting the company's vision.

“This acquisition is a great fit for TierPoint, expanding upon our growth strategy in Tier 2 markets,” said Kent. “We are bringing to Northeast Florida our culture of providing enterprise-grade cloud, colocation and managed services, delivered with local customer service that is second to none.”

With its prior acquisitions, TierPoint now owns and operates more than 365,000 square feet of data center space in 14 US markets.

CxP Data Centers will immediately be branded as TierPoint.