There will be no more data centre purchases for Canadian-based cloud and managed services firm OnX Enterprise Solutions in the near future as the company moves to focus on its managed solutions business.
Just three months ago, OnX bought Chicago-based disaster recovery company Worknet Inc. It was the second United States service provider OnX has acquired and the purchase brought to three the number of data centres the Canadian firm has in North America.
“Three data centres are enough for our plans at the moment,” said newly appointed OnX president, Paul Khawaja. “We have no immediate plans to buy another data centre.”
Instead, he said, OnX will be focusing on growing further its successful software and services solutions business even as it continues to search for more customers south of the border with a strong U.S. sales team.
“We’re a bit newer in the U.S. market here,” said Ohio-based Gayle Pekkola, senior director of marketing for OnX. “We’re leveraging what we’ve learned from the successful Canadian model.”
Khawaja, who joined OnX last summer as executive vice-president of the company after leaving his executive post at Toronto-based software company Softchoice Corp.
The increasing adoption of managed cloud services by Canadian businesses is fueling this strategy, he said.
“We are very pleased to see that our Canadian clients are adopting infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS),” said Khawaja. “Adoption has been growing among SMBs and large enterprise and this goes to show that more CIOs are realizing the benefit of an OpEx (operational expenditure) model over the CapEx (capital expenditure) model.”
Apart from being a data centre operator, OnX also designs hardware and software services solutions for verticals. In May this year, OnX signed a deal with Hitachi Data Systems to sell that company’s clinical repository information management package.
OnX’s Momentum division also sells on-premise and hosted Web content management solutions. Among is customers are Holt Renfrew, Shoppers Drug Mart, Mercedes Benz and Toshiba.
Business in the managed services space has been good for Onx. For instance, said Khawaja, the company’s revenues amounted to $7.8 million two fiscal years ago. That number rose to $30 million during the last fiscal year.
