London & Frankfurt
I am guessing Equinix will want to hold onto LD4 in Slough and FR2 in Frankfurt as they are home to some very sought after and expensive co-location for financial customers.
Equinix will be forced to offload data centres in Amsterdam, London and Frankfurt as the price of EU approval of its takeover of Telecity. The European Commission has given a conditional green light to the £2.3bn deal, which Equinix first announced bid back in May, aiming to add 39 European data centres to its 100-strong US …
As part of the clearance, Equinix and TelecityGroup have agreed to divest the following facilities: TelecityGroup's Bonnington House, Sovereign House, Meridian Gate and Oliver's Yard data centers and Equinix's West Drayton data center in London; TelecityGroup's Science Park and Amstel Business Park I in Amsterdam; and TelecityGroup's Lyonerstrasse data center in Frankfurt. In the nine months from January-September 2015, these assets contributed approximately four percent of the combined TelecityGroup and Equinix revenues for that period.
This is a bloody disaster for all of us Telecity customers. I never thought it would make it through, but I guess when you promise with puppy dog eyes to sell some 'key' assets, people roll over. Those keys assets are the old DCs no one wants to use anyway.
It's going to be disappointing to watch Telecity be trampled over by the big-d!ck swinging Equinix. They have built a great company, with first-class DCs, and Equinix will rip it all to bits.
Telecity is dead; long live Telecity.
As an ex-Telecity customer and a current (and happy, albeit paying £££) Equinix customer, I am on the flip side of the fence here. For us at least, Equinix have been a very good data centre provider (albeit for £££ as noted!). Arguably their facilities have been better than anything we have used in the past, although to be fair I couldn't comment on more recent data centre facility builds/fit-outs from other providers or their business practices. Aside from required divestments, I can't see Equinix ripping anything "to bits" in Telecity, data centre wise? Equinix also build "first class data centres" (what's the definition here anyway?) and if Telecity's remaining ones measure up (do they?) then I'd guess they should be OK with Equinix. Meanwhile, if Telecity Meridian/Sovereign/Bonnington are all up for grabs one assumes they'll likely all go to a new provider as a group, so customers based there probably need to worry more about any new potential owner over Equinix?).