About 13 years ago, when Spring Comdex still existed, I was treated to a tour of the Internap Network Services Corp. data center in Atlanta. It was an impressive site, with loads of security and racks upon racks of servers and disk.
At this point the company was just a few years old, having been founded in 1996.
I’m sure this data center is even more impressive now after more than a decade of growth. And the data center isn’t the only thing growing. The company’s share price soared nearly 35 percent in the last quarter, according to Data Center Knowledge, beating all other rivals.
Not all publicly traded data center companies fared so well. Rackspace Hosting fell 32 percent in the same period. In fact, of the 11 companies tracked, five lost share value while half a dozen gained.
This is despite a near record-setting stock market in the last quarter.
Internap also had a good quarter, and a full fiscal 2012. Revenue for the last fiscal year was $273 million, with an EBITA of $51.9 million – a pretty nice margin in such a competitive field. For the fourth quarter, the company pulled in nearly $70 million with an EBITA of $15 million.
Also in the last year Internap deployed 26,000 square feet of new data center space. “We are pleased with the strong finish to 2012. The continued execution of our growth strategy is reflected in full year revenue and Adjusted EBITDA growth of 12 and 20 percent, respectively. Successful integration of the Voxel business and focus on our organic colocation, hosting and cloud infrastructure businesses have delivered full-year growth in data center services revenue of 25 percent,” said Eric Cooney, president and chief executive officer at Internap at the time of the announcement.
“As we look forward to 2013, the priority is simple – focus on continued execution of the strategy to deliver a platform of high-performance, hybridized IT Infrastructure services. We remain confident that the opportunity for long-term profitable growth and stockholder value creation is significant in the market for outsourced IT Infrastructure services,” he added.
Nowadays, Internap offers a range of services besides standard colocation. It has a content delivery network (CDN), cloud services, dedicated hosting, and managed hosting. The company got into the colocation business in 2000 when it bought CO Space. In 2011, Internap bought Voxel Holdings, which sold cloud and hosting services for the enterprise, accelerating Internap’s push into the cloud.
Edited by
Braden Becker
