GTT Grows Data Centre Network With £1.6bn Interoute Deal

European data centre networking provider Interoute is being acquired by American cloud networking provider GTT Communications Inc.

The all-cash deal is said to be valued at about 1.9bn euros (£1.6bn).

London-based Interoute has grown rapidly over the past few years thanks to a series of acquisitions, and it now operates one of Europe’s largest independent fibre networks.

Deal Terms

The acquisition of Interoute will expand GTT’s tier 1 network will include over 400 points of presence, and interconnect 126 cities across 29 countries.

The deal will add 15 data centres, 17 virtual data centres and 51 colocation facilities, and enhance GTT’s cloud connectivity platform.

It will also expand GTT’s multinational client base, adding over 1,000 strategic enterprise and carrier clients, primarily headquartered in Europe.

“The acquisition of Interoute represents a major milestone in delivering on our purpose of connecting people, across organisations and around the world,” said Rick Calder, GTT president and CEO.

“This combination creates a disruptive market leader with substantial scale, unique network assets and award-winning product capabilities to fulfill our clients’ growing demand for distributed cloud networking in Europe, the US and across the globe,” said Calder.

GTT expects the transaction to close in three to six months.

“This is an exciting next chapter for Interoute, GTT, our customers and our team,” said Gareth Williams, Interoute CEO. “The combined assets and strengths of our two companies create a powerful portfolio of high-capacity, low-latency connectivity, and innovative cloud and edge infrastructure services to support our customers in the global digital economy.”

There was no word over whether the acquisition will result in job losses.

Growth By Acquisition

There is a certain amount of irony that Interoute has itself being acquired by another company. This is because Interoute has grown thanks in part to its own acquisitions.

For example in 2015 it purchased UK managed services provider Easynet for £402m.

And in 2014 it also acquired UK metro and WAN network operator Vtesse for an undisclosed amount.

Interoute had funded its acquisitions in order to expand its data centre network across Europe, by bringing on board private equity investors to help bankroll cloud acquisitions both here and in the US.

The firm, based out of Canary Wharf, had been one of Europe’s largest cloud services platform providers, with networks spread out across the continent, North America, the Middle East and Africa.

Take our cloud computing quiz!