WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The past year has been a whirlwind of activity for Horizon Data Center Solutions (www.horizondcs.com). The Plano, Texas-based data center operator is currently in midst of implementing several major steps in a growth strategy that will secure a presence in all three major power-grids of the United States.
Having raised $5 million in equity funding back in November of 2009, the company says it now has sufficient capital to realize this growth through data center expansions well into 2011.
But more importantly, Horizon says it now has a managerial team with the expertise and background to successfully pull off these expansion plans.
In the past few months, the company has announced several key appointments, including Lance Black as president and CEO, and most recently, former Fusepoint CFO and senior VP of finance David MacGrandle as chief financial officer.
“Now we have a lot more than just traditional colocation sitting at the top of our management chain,” says Chuck Smith, chief marketing officer of Horizon. “Part of it was by strategy and plan, and part of it was that they came available at a really great time with great credentials that fit our business model.”
Horizon is also expanding its managed IT services by “adding more emphasis on IaaS to round out the colocation,” says Smith.
The company launched its private cloud computing platform, FlexSafe Cloud, just over a year ago. In addition to the private cloud solution, Horizon is also offering remote data backup and storage.
To support these services, the company is expanding its IT infrastructure, as mapped out in its tri-coastal strategy.
“We want to do three things,” says Smith. The first of those things is focusing on expanding and growing the company’s business within the vertical markets where it has seen the most success. The second is embracing the power of diversity – the company’s customers look to it for services like disaster recovery, he says, so Horizon looks to establish sites on different US power grids, in the east and west, as well as the Texas ERCOT grid. The last thing the company looks at is access and connectivity, the company looks to build where the access to telecoms is best.
After building three data centers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the company opened its first colocation data center outside Texas last September in Manassas, Virginia at Power Loft’s Innovation campus.
The company will secure a presence on the West Coast within the next year. Smith says Horizon is working on a deal to establish a data center in the San Jose/Santa Clara area.
“It’s a pretty basic strategy,” says Smith. “But within each of those markets we look at multiple data centers that are physically separated to handle any kind of disaster but also be close enough to offer synchronous replication. We looked at multiple sites in those three markets, and that’s where we’re focused, heavy and hard, within the next 12 months.”
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