HawkTalk 54 with Bill Fathers, CEO of Cologix

Growth for data center providers is a must, and partnering with hyperscale users can immensely benefit that growth. Get the inside details of what these relationships look like from Bill Fathers, CEO of Cologix. This is an episode of HawkTalk, datacenterHawk’s series of candid one on one conversations with executives and leaders in the data center industry. If you enjoyed this episode, you can check them all out on our blog. If you’d like to know when we release future episodes, you can subscribe to our channel. Cologix has made it a goal to own the most connected facilities, known as carrier hotels, in the markets they’re in. Bill Fathers, CEO of Cologix, sits down and discusses this and other strategies they have and how they plan to grow in the future. If you’re short on time, check out a few of our quick takeaways below. The recent area of growth for Cologix Cologix has kept the same value proposition for its customers over the past 20 years with a focus on network dense carrier hotel type facilities. The Cologix customer enters their facilities for one of two reasons, they want access to a dense number of carriers, and they want to connect to other Cologix customers. This is made more interesting with the rise of public cloud. Cologix’s number one customer type has shifted to the major cloud service providers, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. who all want to be connected to one another and because Cologix already operates highly connected carrier hotels, the relationship makes sense. Hyperscale growth in the Columbus market Cologix has seen the interest from major Hyperscale users such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon in the Columbus market. Columbus offers a central location as well as tax incentives aimed at data centers, so it makes sense that these large companies have built 600+ acres of data center space in this market. This has been a welcome sight for Cologix since they already developed and owned the carrier hotel in Columbus before the interest from the hyperscale users. With the massive increase in traffic that their carrier hotel has seen, Cologix has decided to build an additional 24MW facility to accommodate other cloud service providers. Cologix’s presence in Canada Montreal first piqued the interest of Cologix because of its extremely low cost of electricity as well as it being a high percentage of renewable energy. One of Cologix’s first acquisitions was to acquire the carrier hotel in Montreal, and shortly after they grew into the Toronto and Vancouver markets as well. Their first goal for these markets was to own the carrier hotel environments there. Then after five years they implemented their second phase of growth which was to add additional facilities in each of these markets. Moving forward, Cologix has started building new 30MW+ build to suite facilities specifically for hyperscale users in Montreal, & Toronto. As cloud service providers have risen to prominence, their connectivity requirements have matched up well with data center providers who focus on connectivity, like Cologix. Bill Fathers and his team hope to continue growing along side these prominent cloud service providers that are changing the industry.