Cogeco Peer 1’s new owner today officially renamed the acquired managed hosting and cloud services provider to Aptum, and said it’s focused on becoming Canada’s first independent, neutral-host provider of small cell and 5G infrastructure across greater Toronto and Montreal regions.
The name change comes roughly five months after Florida-based Digital Colony struck a deal with Cogeco Communications to acquire Peer 1 for $720 million. Aptum will remain headquartered in Toronto with two focused business units – data centre and fibre.
“This wasn’t just a name change, it was a complete change in the way we structure the company,” Susan Bowen, chief executive officer of Aptum, told CDN after the announcement. “We’ve been very focused on stabilizing the business in the first 100 days [since being acquired].”
Cogeco Peer 1’s revenue has been on a declining trend in recent years under the ownership of Cogeco Communications, but Bowen said Aptum and its new ownership are confident that they can reverse that trend. This means sticking to a renewed focus on Aptum’s data centre business that enables multi-cloud services for enterprises, and rolling out what Aptum calls Canada’s first independent, neutral-host provider of small cell and 5G infrastructure.
With 42 per cent of startup businesses in Canada planning to adopt artificial intelligence– a number that is only likely to go up – and a growing number of enterprises figuring out how to integrate AI into their own services, Aptum has plenty of opportunities ahead. The new standalone business will include a portion of Cogeco Peer 1’s 3,300 km of fibre in the Toronto and Montreal areas, 16 data centres across North America and Europe, and offices in Toronto and Vancouver. Cogeco Communications will retain a portion of that fibre network for its own network needs, according to a previous interview with Philippe Jetté, CEO of Cogeco Inc.
In a press release, Ludwig Gamache, IT director of Aptum partner Element AI, said ever since the two companies began working together two years ago, the company has become 35 times bigger than when it launched in 2016.
“Our requirements are different from most companies because of the compute-intensive nature of machine learning and AI algorithms – which generate more heat to dissipate and higher power demands than average customers,” said Gamache. “For the past two years, Cogeco Peer 1 has consistently delivered.”
Today’s announcement also included the launch of two new Aptum offerings. One is managed Amazon Web Services, complementing its similar offering around Azure, the other is the expansion of Cloud Connect, an offering that provides users with a dedicated and secure connection to cloud services. Cloud Connect is now available for AWS Direct Connect, Google Cloud Platform, ServiceNow, Salesforce, SAP and Oracle in addition to Microsoft ExpressRoute. The Cloud Connect expansion is available in all regions.
