ViaWest is a multi-tenant data center provider with 22 facilities located throughout Colorado, Texas, Oregon, Utah and Nevada. Founded in 1999, ViaWest is a privately owned data center and managed services provider and touts itself as being “one of the largest privately owned data center providers in North America”.

General Company Statistics

• Headquartered in Denver
• Over 300 employees
• Founded in 1999
• Original management team still in place since inception
• Has made over 17 acquisitions to date

Recent Acquisition

In April of 2010, ViaWest was acquired by Oak Hills partners and GI in a $420MM transaction (with a 12.4x multiple!). Assuming the 12.4x multiple was of their EBITDA, ViaWest, at their time of sale, had an annual EBITDA of roughly $33MM ($420MM / 12.4), which, divided by an estimated 1500 customers, equals out to an annual average contract value of $2,200 per customer, or an equivalent $183 per month per customer.

In comparison, a half cabinet colocation customer could easily spend roughly $300-$500 per month for power, bandwidth and space. So, considering all of the rough estimates and approximations just made, it is likely that an average ViaWest customer is colocating just a few “U” of servers (or has a dedicated server or a virtual server, etc.).

ViaWest Case Study

The Tough Questions

Why does ViaWest’s own network diagram, show only 11 data center facilities – where are the other 11 of their 22 total data centers?

When ViaWest purchased Consonus in Utah, Consonus had just recovered from a major outage due to a 3rd party maintanance error. Was that outage big enough to make that facility ‘damaged goods’ to the valuable and growing local Utah market?

ViaWest has expanded rapidly through regional competitor acquisitions. Will financing the debt from these acquisitions make it difficult to compete head to head on price with local competition in a time where companies are taking a serious look at IT infrastructure cost savings?

ViaWest Offices

Latest posts on ViaWest

• ViaWest Update In May 2012, ViaWest signed a lease on an 110,000 square foot facility in Las Vegas that will house their new energy efficient data center. In addition to being their second such facility in the greater Las Vegas area, it also will house a state-of-the-art design that is LEED and Energy Star certified. ViaWest has ...
• ViaWest growth in the Utah data center market ViaWest has expanded their data center presence in Utah. This article takes a look at ViaWest’s efforts to solidify their position as a market leader in Utah.