DartPoints Nabs Venyu’s Secure Data Centers In Private-Equity-Backed Expansion

‘[Venyu’s] facilities have always been top-notch. Staff and support have been wonderful, and our account manager is always checking in on us. ... We’re excited to see what the acquisition has in store. DartPoints definitely brings some new opportunities to the table for us that we want to explore,’ Roddy Bergeron, CISO of Venyu customer Enterprise Data Concepts, tells CRN.

DartPoints is growing its national data center footprint with the acquisition Tuesday of Venyu, a company that builds and hosts weather-tested, secure data centers in the heart of South Louisiana’s “Hurricane Alley.”

Backed by private equity powerhouse Astra Capital Management, the move to merge with Venyu marks DartPoints’ fourth acquisition since 2020, DartPoints CEO Scott Willis told CRN.

With Venyu’s three data centers now folded into the company’s portfolio, Willis said the company now has 11 data centers across 10 U.S. markets with more than 325,000 square feet of space. DataPoints is focused on growing in edge data center markets, the Tier 2 and Tier 3 regions and some larger Tier 4 regions.

“I came in during the summer of 2019 under an edge data center thesis and we worked on that thesis and we evaluated a number of companies,” Willis said. “We landed on DartPoints as the initial platform and Venyu is our fourth acquisition around that thesis. We hope to evolve as workloads evolve and push farther out to the edge.”

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Enterprise Data Concepts Chief Information and Security Officer Roddy Bergeron told CRN the IT services provider, based in Lafayette, La., moved to a colocation setup with Venyu to harden its server environment against outages during natural disasters.

“Being in South Louisiana’s Hurricane Alley, we needed to ensure the critical services we run for clients had minimal downtime, even during a disaster. Venyu was a great fit for us as they had a Tier 3 data center within our footprint,” Bergeron said. “Over the years, we expanded to offering clients warm sites and colocation services through our Venyu partnership. Clients have been able to utilize colo service to help their business grow and save money by reducing outages.”

When there was a mild Distributed Denial-of-Service attack against the company’s servers, Venyu jumped in to mitigate the effects upstream, Bergeron said.

“The facilities have always been top-notch. Staff and support have been wonderful, and our account manager is always checking in on us,” he said. “When maintenance is being done, we’re always given a proper heads up. Just top-notch service all around. We’re excited to see what the acquisition has in store. DartPoints definitely brings some new opportunities to the table for us that we want to explore.”

DartPoints has locations in the Midwest and Southeast, and Venyu gives the company an option for customers in Louisiana.

“Venyu is a really nice fit,” Willis said. “They really add to our vision and strategy of building out what we believe is the leading edge data center operation in the industry. That’s what we’re focused on doing. So we’re excited. We’re excited about Venyu and what that acquisition is going to bring to DartPonts.”

Venyu specializes in providing secure data centers. The company’s Shreveport, La., facility is built to U.S. Department of Defense anti-terrorism force protection codes and is one of the most secure commercial data centers in the country, DartPoints said. With more than 30 years operating in Louisiana, Venyu also was one of the country’s first service providers to offer virtualization as a disaster recovery solution after Hurricane Katrina.

“We offer the full breadth and portfolio and capability of the major operators,” Willis said. “If you go and look at Equinix and what they deliver in Northern California as an example, a major hub. We deliver that same capability, whether it’s co-location, whether it’s hybrid cloud or managed services—we deliver it in a very interconnected, robust, secure and viable facility.”

Willis said the company does not expect to woo massive enterprises away from hyperscalers. He said there is ample growth in the Tier 2 and Tier 3 regions, as more companies outside large urban areas find their path to digital transformation and the demand for data centers increases.

“The data center is the heartbeat. It’s the ecosystem that’s going to enable all of these workloads and use cases, whichever one you want to talk about. … Artificial intelligence being one of them, robotics, telehealth, pick your application,” he said. “And our objective is we want to enable that as locally and as close to where the demand is as possible.”

DartPoints has been backed by Astra Capital Management since May 2020 and is tasked with the mission to grow edge colocation, cloud and cybersecurity services aggressively in midsize markets. DartPoints bought Metro Data Centers in October 2020 and Immedion in March 2021.