Granite Networks Grand Opening Event on May 14th, 2012

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 1st, 2012

Granite Networks is proud to announce the Grand Opening of its Tier III carrier agnostic facility, the first of its kind in Eastern Ontario. Please join us to celebrate this milestone on Monday, May 14th, 2012 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.

Our 28,000 square foot data centre is fully operation and meets Federal Government Secret Classification standards. Granite Networks is a vendor and carrier neutral hosting company that offers Colocation, Managed Services, Cloud Hosting Services, Virtual Servers, and Disaster Recovery to both small- and medium-sized businesses in the National Capital Region.

“We are dedicated to providing Legendary Customer Service and to creating a secure and comfortable environment for our clients, staff, and executive team. Quality and sophistication inspired our design, which is apparent the moment you walk through our doors. We are excited by the prospect of showing the Ottawa area what Granite Networks has built in such a short amount of time on May 14th,” says James Mackenzie, President and CEO of Granite Networks.

This year, James Mackenzie received the Ottawa Top 40 Under 40 Award and, as such, is recognized as an accomplished industry and community leader under the age of 40. The awards are co-hosted by Ottawa Business Journal and the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce.

To attend the Grand Opening please rsvp: rsvp@granite-networks.ca

Source: marketing@granite-networks.ca

Granite Announces Board Additions

Granite Networks is pleased to announce the appointment of William Schrader, Caroline Somers and Lance Laking to its board of directors. This dynamic group of industry leaders and experts will play key developmental roles in Granite Networks’ growth strategies and governance processes, thus ensuring our success as a world-class hosting company. “The addition of these great personalities to our board strengthens our senior management team, ensuring we all are working together to bring the best technology with the best value to a region that has been asking for it,” says James Mackenzie, CEO of Granite Networks.

A chairman and CEO for more than 25 years, William Schrader is perhaps best known as the “father of the commercial Internet.” In 1989, he founded PSINet, an early Internet service provider, which was the first of its kind to provide commercial Internet access to companies. The publicly traded company was a major player in the commercialization of the Internet.

Caroline Somers has over 20 years of experience in the high tech industry. She acts as an angel investor, a member of the National Angel Organization and is Managing Partner of the Band of Scoundrels, a partnership of angel investors. She is a consultant and executive coach. In these roles she helped companies with their product and marketing plans and coached executives to better implement these strategies.

Lance Laking is Executive Director at TRM and Entrepreneur-in-Residence with MaRS, a Toronto-based innovation centre building Canada’s next generation of growth companies. As President and CEO of BTI Systems, Mr. Laking played a key role in establishing the company as a leader in Optical Edge communication systems. He earned Deloitte Technology Fast 50 ranking in 2006, 2007, and 2008. He was also responsible for securing more than US$55M in growth capital from US and Canadian venture capital investors.

About Granite Networks

Granite Networks is a vendor and carrier neutral hosting company built with Tier 3 and LEED standards in mind, offering colocation, managed services, and cloud hosting services to small and medium businesses in the Ottawa area and beyond. This specialty data centre focuses on four main features: carrier neutrality, support for high densities, high reliability, and legendary customer service.

For more information: sales@granite-networks.com

Source: marketing@granite-networks.ca

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Client ready and fully operational

Granite Networks completed the construction and opened the first Tier 3 data centre in Eastern Ontario on April 2nd, 2012, two months ahead of schedule.

"Completing a project of this complexity and scale is a testament to our in-house engineering and project management processes and the skill and passion of our entire team," says Granite's CEO, James Mackenzie. "Our desire to accelerate our timelines is part of the commitment we have made with our customers who have resoundly said three words: it's about time. We are excited to serve our business customers as they move in and embrace our culture of legendary customer service founded on incredible reliability."

The 28,000-facility footprint harnesses two megawatts of power and is fed from diverse hydro grids. The facility is servicing private sector and public sector customers in the National Capital Region and those seeking a business continuity option out of Toronto or Montreal. With access to large amounts of fibre, there is a strong focus on security and redundancy for customers' data assets, having dual-credential biometric checkpoints and multiple mantraps into the high security zones and redundant power offered as a standard to all clients.

"Customers who are truly looking for colocation services in the National Capital Region will finally have an alternative. Granite Networks is Eastern Ontario’s first and only TIER 3 carrier agnostic colocation service provider." Typically, clients who were looking for such facilities were forced to look outside the NCR, commented Peter McGillvray Vice President of Sales. “Granite is well positioned to meet the growing market demands in both the public and private sectors. Our ability to expand in the future as our customers' needs grow means we can grow with them, regardless of their geographical location”.

"Now that our first customers are online, our focus is shifting to serving their needs" adds Jason van Gaal, Chief Operating Officer. "Our customers are expecting a great facility with every policy and procedure in place to protect them and their data. We aim to surpass their expectations with our level of service and dedication."

Granite offers colocation solutions with small to large segregated and locked bays up to larger custom built cages, and will begin work on a highly redundant and elastic cloud platform and growing a managed services team to support customer needs.

About Granite Networks

Granite Networks is a vendor and carrier neutral hosting company built with Tier 3 and LEED standards in mind, offering colocation, managed services and cloud hosting services to small and medium businesses in the Ottawa area and beyond. This specialty data centre focuses on four main features: carrier neutrality, support for high densities, high reliability and legendary customer service.

For more information: marketing@granite-­networks.com

Source: marketing@granite-networks.ca

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Building Capacity

James Mackenzie stands on a bare concrete floor in a gutted 28,000-square-foot Kanata warehouse, not far from a jagged entranceway created by smashing through an internal concrete wall.

In a few months, that rough opening will be turned into a viewing window, allowing visitors to the former Abbott Laboratories on Hazeldean Road to see inside the largest high-end data centre in eastern Ontario.

Approximately $15 million will be spent on the facility, filling the room with more than 260 seven-foot cabinets and rows of blinking servers, surrounded by a four-foot corridor for extra security.

Mr. Mackenzie, the president and CEO of Granite Networks, reaches into his pocket and pulls out his iphone to explain why investors are pouring millions of dollars into the project before it generates any revenues.

The exploding volume of online data, fuelled in part by the proliferation of smartphones, has Granite and major telecom companies banking on businesses growing tired of endlessly upgrading their IT capacity.

“You cannot put your infrastructure in a closet anymore,” Mr. Mackenzie said.

While Granite is marketing itself as a way for companies to avoid the capital and maintenance costs of operating their own assets, the Kanata firm also has its eye on cashing in on the federal government’s efforts to consolidate its IT portfolio.

Specifically, the federal government wants to reduce its more than 300 data centres to fewer than 20. Granite’s vicepresident of sales, Peter Mcgillvray, says his company’s proximity to government operations in central Ottawa will give his company an advantage over other local operators, as he expects solicitations to include a requirement for data centres to be within a certain distance of government clients.

Competitors in the area include Bell, which is building an 82,000-square-foot data centre in Buckingham, Que., expected to open in late 2012. The telecom giant says it’s signed three contracts for use of the space, totalling $100 million.

Primus Canada, meanwhile, has two facilities in Ottawa totalling 30,000 square feet and plans to break ground on a third in 2012. The company holds approximately 60 to 70 per cent of Ottawa’s mid-market sector for multi-tenant data services.

Executive vice-president A.J. Byers says he’s “absolutely aware that there are some competitors coming to town,” but adds he still sees Primus’s biggest barrier to growth being companies choosing to keep servers in-house.

Back on Hazeldean Road, Granite is financed by the owners’ friends and family, as well as angel investors. Mr. Mackenzie says the company has enough cash to last another year, but chief operating officer Jason van Gaal adds there is enough interest among potential customers to sell out the facility “three-and-a-half times.”

The firm says it will hit its break-even point when it starts utilizing between 10 and 20 per cent of its capacity.

Nevertheless, the company’s co-owners concede data centres are a risky venture, considering the large amounts of upfront capital investments required before a single dollar of revenue is generated.

And while the centre can access electricity from two separate power grids, and is backed up by generators to reduce the chances of it ever going offline, it is nevertheless a perilous proposition to build one’s reputation on continuous uptime.

“You only get one chance to make a first impression,” says Mr. van Gaal.

Source: Ottawa Business Journal

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Granite Networks adds datacenter in Ottawa, Canada

Granite Networks is building its 28,000-gross-square-foot datacenter in Kanata, Ontario, Canada, just 14 miles outside of Ottawa. The company first opened its doors on November 14, and it is working diligently to complete interior work for a May 30, 2012 opening that could be moved to as early as February 28, 2012, based on demand.

The company has contracted for an initial 2MW of capacity on diverse hydro grids with opportunity to upgrade transformers as needed – 144 strands of fiber enter the facility from two redundant central offices. Granite has secured a contract with one carrier and has pending contracts with additional carriers, each of which will have private demarcation rooms within the facility. The infrastructure will support the company's colocation and managed services, with an initial hosted and cloud services offering that will expand after full buildout.

The building is cinderblock built on bedrock, not exceeding two stories, and located on the 100-year flood plain on one of the area's highest points. Granite Networks will initially open 8,000 square feet of datacenter floor space, which is expandable to 16,000 square feet in the future. In addition, an available parking area and neighboring property offer 20,000 square feet of expansion space. The facility also offers 3,000 square feet of dedicated and flex disaster recovery space.

Ottawa's datacenter market

Ottawa, Canada's capital, is a quiet market in the datacenter sector. Granite Networks cites a single competitor in the market, but notes the excess of opportunity available to serve multiple business verticals. Primarily the need for datacenter space lies with the government, which has extremely specific requirements, including location within 40km (about 25 miles) of Ottawa. Other verticals include financial, medical, technology and general entrepreneurial businesses to provide ample demand for datacenter services.

With a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) population of 1.1 million people, Ottawa has the fourth largest growth rate among Canadian cities. The city's largest employer is the federal government with over 110,000 employees from the area. Ottawa has about 1800 technology companies that employ about 80,000 people, including Nortel Networks, Corel, 3M, Adobe Systems, Bell Canada, IBM, Alcatel-Lucent and Hewlett-Packard. Behind those two sectors are health, business, finance, administration and sales and services as the top occupations in the area.

T1R take

Ottawa seems to be an overlooked market to datacenter providers that appear to opt for the emerging major markets of Toronto and Montreal that were covered in our recent North American MTDC Supply: Emerging Major Markets report. Granite's new datacenter will break the market monopoly previously held by Primus, but will be quickly followed by Bell Canada's new facility in late 2012. Granite has pursued the right approach by selecting a market with apparent need for datacenter services, and has proceeded with an aggressive sales strategy to secure clients before the facility opens. This will offer Granite an opportunity for upfront success and a leading edge on the market's demand. We expect to see additional expansions in this company's future as it attempts to curb the supply/demand imbalance in the market.

Source: Tier 1 Research