Peak 10

Peak 10, Inc. is an IT infrastructure company based in Charlotte, North Carolina. It offers cloud computing solutions, managed data center services including colocation and private network services; and managed services including cloud storage and managed security.

In addition to its headquarters and data center in Charlotte, the company has data center campuses in Raleigh, North Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; Tampa, Florida; Jacksonville, Florida; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Louisville, Kentucky; Atlanta, Georgia; Nashville, Tennessee; and Cincinnati, Ohio.

The company was included in Inc. Magazine's list of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the country in 2005 (69th) and in 2006 (240th).

History

2000-2003: Start up years

Peak 10 was founded at the height of The Dot-com bubble in 2000 by David Jones and Nicholas Kottyan, a pair of executives in Charlotte who had been involved with several other technology-based startups. With $350,000 each from their personal savings, the duo planned to build and operate state-of-the-art data storage facilities for middle market companies. Their target customers were Internet service providers, systems integrators and Tier I co-location providers with customer demands in second-tier cities. After raising approximately $6 million from a group of angel investors, Jones and Kottyan opened the first Peak 10 data center in Jacksonville, Fla., in August 2000 followed by a Charlotte data center and headquarters building in January 2001.

In February 2001, Seaport Capital, a New York-based private-equity firm and Charlotte-based venture fund Frontier Capital invested $18.5 million in the young company. At the time, it was the largest venture capital deal in Charlotte in almost a year. A short time later, Seaport invested another $9 million to fund more growth. From 2000 to 2003, Peak 10 opened a total of four data centers. In addition to the Jacksonville and Charlotte facilities, data centers were opened in Tampa, Florida and Raleigh, North Carolina.

Shortly after the company became profitable in 2002, Kottyan left the company and joined DataChambers, a Peak 10 competitor. With Kottyan’s departure, Jones assumed the position of chief executive officer and has remained at the helm of Peak 10 since.

2004-2007: Acquisitions and expansion

Employing a conservative growth strategy, Peak 10 selectively entered new markets by focusing on acquisitions of existing data centers rather than engaging in speculative builds. Between 2004 and 2007, the company acquired businesses in Louisville, Kentucky; Nashville, Tennessee and Richmond, Virginia. The company also acquired the hosting division of InterCerve, now SQL Sentry, in Charlotte, North Carolina. and an existing data center facility in Atlanta, Georgia. During this period, a second facility was opened in the Louisville market and facilities were expanded in Charlotte, Jacksonville and Raleigh.

In 2008, Peak 10 secured a credit facility that grew to $60 million, funded by RBC Bank, GE Capital and CIT Group, to support further expansion.

2008-2009: Accelerated growth

Peak 10's trajectory of growth sped up over the next two years as the company opened additional data centers opened in Nashville, Raleigh, Tampa, Charlotte and Atlanta. Peak 10 also opened its first data center in Cincinnati, Ohio, a greenfield market, and acquired 1Vault Networks in Fort Lauderdale. In addition, the company introduced its first private cloud service to capture a share of the growing market for cloud-based solutions. In 2009, Frontier Capital’s investment in Peak 10 was sold to McCarthy Capital, an Omaha, Nebraska-based private-equity fund.

2010 – present: Still growing

In 2010, private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe teamed up with Peak 10 management to buy the company from majority owner Seaport Capital and McCarthy Capital. Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe became the majority stakeholder. CEO David Jones and his management team retained minority ownership and continue to operate the business. The deal was valued at more than $400 million. At the time, the transaction was considered the biggest private-equity deal involving a Charlotte-based technology company in years, possibly ever. As part of the deal, Peak 10 closed on a $155 million credit facility led by RBC Capital and GE Capital.

Since 2010, Peak 10 has added additional data centers in Louisville, Nashville, Fort Lauderdale and Charlotte. In 2013, Peak 10 expanded sales operations in the Northeast region of the U.S. and announced a multi-phase expansion in Atlanta. The company will build out three 12,000 square foot phases for three separate data centers in the High Tech Corridor in Alpharetta, a northern Atlanta suburb.

In 2014 GI Partners, a leading middle market private equity investment firm based in Menlo Park, California, acquired Peak 10 from Welsh Carson. CEO David Jones and his management team retained minority ownership and continue to operate the business.

Media and awards

In 2011, Peak 10 became one of the first data center organizations to undergo an SSAE 16 (formerly the Statement of Audit Standards Number 70) Type II audit.

In 2012, Peak 10 data centers and cloud infrastructure were validated for PCI DSS 2.0 Level 1 compliance and successfully completed an annual company-wide compliance audit for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. Peak 10 also achieved the Cisco Cloud Provider Certification with a Cisco Powered Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) designation in 2012.

In 2013, the company was named a Bronze Stevie Award Winner for Customer Service Department of the Year. The company has been a Stevie Award finalist every year since 2009.

The company also launched one of the industry's first multi-tenant SQL as a Service solutions in the cloud in 2013. The high availability, database as a service (DBaaS) solution that provides access to a secure, high-performance managed database environment for running, developing and testing Microsoft SQL-dependent database applications.

In 2014, Peak 10 became the first provider in the Americas to achieve the Cisco® Powered DRaaS Certification. .

Acquisitions

In 2004, Peak 10 acquired Xodiax, a Louisville, Ky.-based provider of managed services, collocation, hosting and connectivity.

In 2006, Peak 10 acquired RenTech, a data center and IT services company in Nashville, Tennessee and the hosting division of Intercerve.

In 2007, Peak 10 acquired bayMountain, a Richmond, Virginia-based data center company that specializes in managed hosting and colocation services.

In 2009, Peak 10 acquired South Florida-based 1Vault Networks, a data services provider.

Products and services

Peak 10 products and services are categorized in three broad categories: Cloud, IT infrastructure and managed services.

• Cloud: Peak 10 cloud offerings are based on the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model and are designed to handle production workloads. Peak 10 cloud infrastructure has been audited for HIPAA and PCI DSS compliance. Deployment models include:
  • Enterprise Cloud, a public cloud that can be configured by cloud servers or resource pools
  • Private Cloud, which provides dedicated compute and/or storage resources while providing the benefits of virtualization
  • Recovery Cloud, a Disaster Recovery as a Service solution, which employs continuous data protection (CDP) style replication to minimize data loss.

Peak 10 also offers a cloud-delivered virtual desktop, cloud storage and SQL as a Service.

• IT Infrastructure: Services include managed data center services (colocation) and network services.
• Managed Services: Services include server management and monitoring, application support, data services and managed security service.