The Fonds de solidarité FTQ Investissements croissance (FSIC), a Quebec worker’s union fund, has invested in a new cloud data centre platform in Drummondville, Québec, about 100 km’s east of Montreal. Also participating is Investissements W2, a private Québec investment firm that targets businesses with high growth potential.
The company, COLO-D, operates a next-generation data centre dedicated to hosting private, hybrid and public cloud services and infrastructures. Offering neutral, green colocation services, COLO-D “makes it easy for Canadian and Québec companies to integrate and operate new technologies in a secure, efficient manner.”
With the development of a management portal reserved for its customers, COLO-D is a leader in Cloud Ready colocation services in Québec. (A colocation centre is simply a type of data centre where equipment, space, and bandwidth are available for rental to retail customers,)
Quebec seems to an attractive option for big data centres, because of healthy provincial subsidies, and of course, the cold weather (server infrastructure costs a lot to cool, so cold weather is a good thing). COLO-D is calling itself “a strategic international development centre for U.S. and foreign ICT firms and suppliers looking to establish or consolidate their presence inNorth America and ensure their data security.”
“COLO-D has quickly positioned itself as a date center collocation service,” said the cofounder of Investissements W2, Nicolas Bélanger. “Its new ecosystem puts businesses first, providing high-speed hosting to large businesses with robust digital environments dedicated to cloud, mobile and financial computing services.”
FSIC’s president, Alain Denis, said COLO-D “is at the forefront of Québec’s digital economy.”
“COLO-D is ushering in a new era in the development of data centres in Québec.”
The FSIC invests in mature stage Québec companies in the information, telecommunications, digital technology and green technology sectors. It was created in 2012 by the Fonds de solidarité FTQ, the largest labour-sponsored fund in Canada.