One of the country’s biggest independent services provider has created a new data centre and cloud division to focus on serving medium and enterprise-sized companies as well as governments.
Primus Telecommunications Canada, long known for its telecom and hosted PBX business, said Tuesday its data centre, cloud and managed services will now be offered through its BlackIron Data division
“Over the last two to three years we’ve focused more on the data centre business,” A.J. Byers, president of the new unit, said in an interview. “But we found that the key aspects of the data centre business are different from our telecom business.
“The data centre and cloud infrastructure business is very big on certification and compliance, service level agreements, guaranteed up time, and that is what BlackIron is focused on to drive a premier product.”
Primus has eight data centres across the country, the most recent of which is a Tier III facility certified by the Uptime Institute north of Toronto in Markham.
The company has a good base of customers, Byers said, but new customers they want certain assurances from a data centre providers. BlackIron can deliver that because all of its data centres meet a number of security and performance certifications, including PCI, CICA 5970 Type B, SSAE 16 Type II and ISAE 3402.
“Our compelling differentiator is that we have third party certification, validation and auditing against everything we do, so that when you’re making a decision about where to put your infrastructure you can be assured that you can rely on us.”
BlackIron competes against the biggest data center service providers in the country, including IBM Canada, Bell Canada and CGI.
IBM opens $90 million data centre
As for pricing of products and services, Byers said BlackIron is “competitive,” with the added value of the compliance and certifications it has.
There are some “pricing incentives” now available for new customers that go along with the launch of the new brand.