eStruxture: A digital company that is carving out a leading position in the Canadian market
A year ago almost to the day, la Caisse’s Private Equity, Québec team, and Canderel, partnered with a young company in digital technology with very promising growth potential. Three acquisitions later, eStruxture has taken giant steps in setting up its pan-Canadian platform of cloud-based data centres. In fact, today the company has four data centres, with three in the Montréal area and one in Vancouver, and ranks among the Canadian leaders in providing flexible, scalable and hyperscalable solutions.
The importance of investing in the digital economy
For the Québec team, which seeks to be present in the sectors that make a difference to our economy, this transaction is a good example of success: eStruxture contributes positively to Montréal as a key data and cloud-computing hosting centre. This innovative company is driving growth. In fact, to date, it has acquired three existing data centres. In addition, it has entirely transformed a building to create a new, cutting-edge data centre. The building was previously home to the printer for The Gazette, a daily newspaper. This represents an extreme transformation in purpose, which perfectly illustrates the transition toward a digital economy.
Of course, eStruxture is not alone in the Canadian data centre market. But its distinguishing factor is its positioning in a little-exploited niche of neutral, high-density data centres. In fact, independence from telecommunications providers is the standard for most data centres around the world, but not in Canada, where there is strong presence of only few major players. With data processing centres associated with these few players, customer choice is limited. eStruxture takes advantage of this market gap by offering its customers a solution that provides optimal flexibility. This way they can work with their preferred telecommunications providers while maintaining access to the very latest in storage.
More than ever, data processing is a key activity that is at the centre of many activity sectors, which accounts for its rapid expansion. Consider e-commerce, the video game and entertainment industry, cryptocurrency mines or big data, which have tremendous data storage needs. The same is true for cloud computing, which is widely adopted these days. Companies must therefore have enormous storage capacity that, over time, is scalable to growing needs.
Among the many elements involved in optimizing costs, storage facilities must be energy efficient. On this front, eStruxture enjoys an advantage found in Canada, and in Québec in particular. First is the cost of electricity, which is very low compared to other countries, and is cleaner to produce than in many other areas. Next is the climate, which is an asset because the enormous hosting systems generate a lot of heat and need a cool operating environment.
eStruxture, taking advantage of all these competitive advances, is developing a pan-Canadian platform for very high-density centres. That said, it can provide service to companies with significant data processing needs as well as provide them with optimal flexibility. This is a company that is perfectly aligned with the economy’s digital transition. And la Caisse firmly believes that this transition is a precondition to the long-term success of Québec’s companies. A transition in which the company plans to continue investing in the coming years to help build the economy of tomorrow.