Peak10 For Sale

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| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

Peak10 For Sale

WSJ is reporting that data center company, Peak10, has put itself up for sale. I guess the investors want there money now - and aren't shy about saying so. Even though thre was a "$215 million dividend to its owners, according to Moody's Investors Service" in 2012. The owners include investment firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, which owns 80%.

WSJ is calling Peak10 a data storage company, but they are mainly own data centers and have recently been trying to climb the stack from landlord to managed services with VMware and storage offerings.

So many possibilities here: any of the REITs could buy them or one of the ILEC/CLEC/Cloud companies (Windstream, CenturyLink, TDS) could pick them off.

The $800 million asking price is too big for some CLECs - like TelePacific or Cbeyond - to look at them. Because the Peak10 locations are based solely on the East Coast, you would think that EarthLink might look at them, but again an $800M asking price makes this less likely.

It's unlikely that a cableco will scoop them up because the big 4 are all fighting over TWC at the moment. Kind of distracted. The exception would be Bright House (number 7 system in the US), which is without a data center in the area but has an alignment with Peak10 in Tampa Bay. I don't know if they would want to plunk down $800 million for data centers all over the Southeast, which is not their market. BHN is scattered around the US. Also, BHN is kind of married to TWC, since BHN networks are former TWC networks and BHN uses TWC for channel agreements. A sale of TWC will affect that relationship and partnership.

Peak10 is privately held, so I don't have a clue what the revenue is. Yet in 2012 when it went to "issue a new $300 million senior secured term loan to refinance its existing credit facility and pay a dividend of approximately $215 million to its private-equity owners," S&P gave it a B rating for being leveraged 8x pro-forma.

Data centers are still hot due to the cloud services bonanza. Cloud services need someplace to securely and reliably hold its gear - that would be data centers. So someone will buy Peak10. Hey, maybe Colotraq will.

In other data center news, the brand SAVVIS has been dropped and now it is named CenturyLink Technology Solutions. Blah.



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