Iron Mountain, the storage and information management services company, has announced that it has agreed to form a joint venture with Web Werks, one of India’s leading colocation data center providers. Iron Mountain anticipates investing $ 150 million in the next two years and is projected to be a majority investor in the venture after the investment period. The first transaction stage is anticipated to close within the next 90 days, subject to customary closing conditions.
Web Werks serves three Tier 3, carrier-neutral data centers in Delhi NCR, Mumbai, and Pune. This investment allows Web Werks to quickly extend its operations to its three existing markets and later Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Chennai. Iron Mountain Data Center is investing this to support and expand its existing hyper scale, content, network, and enterprise customers in the rapidly growing pan-India region.
With a 225,000 square feet footprint, Web Werks maintains 6 Points of Presence (POPs) worldwide, delivering 4 megawatts (MW) of capacity, supporting 6,000+ servers and more than 850 clients. Web Werks gives access to strong, content and cloud providers, and a neutral interconnection ecosystem of carriers, involving more than 160 Internet service providers (ISPs) and 6 Internet exchanges.
As market leaders in hyper-connected data centers, Web Werks supports a wide base of well-known brands including banking, enterprises, insurance (BFSI), financial services, and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) who require efficiency in deployment to scale their businesses.
“This investment reflects Iron Mountain’s commitment to invest in high growth, good return global markets to continue to meet our customers’ requirements. The India data center market is projected to grow rapidly in the coming years and we are excited to be an early mover into a market where the demand is high and the supply is low,” stated Mark Kidd, Executive Vice President & General Manager, Iron Mountain Data Centers.
“Web Werks has a highly respected and seasoned leadership team and we are delighted to not only support their continued growth and success, but also to provide our existing Iron Mountain data center customers access to this growing and thriving market,” he added.
India is the second largest telecom market all over the world. As per JLL’s recent report, India’s Colocation Data Center market size is anticipated to increase by 20% (from 375MW in 2020 to 1,078MW in H1 2020). As of December 2020, the Global Data Center Colocation and Interconnection Report, by Structures Research (SR), the Asia Pacific region will account for half of the global colocation market by 2025 driven by large emerging markets such as India.
The SR report identifies Pune and Mumbai as major opportunity markets in India, with a combined estimated MW of significant IT load capacity growth to reach more than 470MW by 2025. “India provides an important next step in expanding our Asia Pacific footprint,” stated Michael Goh, General Manager Asia Pacific at Iron Mountain Data Centers. “We have seen very strong regional demand from our global customers following the grand opening of our Singapore data center, SIN-1, in 2019.”
“Joining forces with the Iron Mountain Data Center team will further solidify Web Werk’s leadership position in the pan-India region and among the broader set of global customers,” stated Nikhil Rathi, CEO, Web Werks. “Web Werks and Iron Mountain Data Centers are fully committed and aligned to grow and scale in order to meet the digital transformation and interconnection needs of our customers. The Joint Venture is expected to be among the select few data center operators with assets across all major cities and also have both Hyperscale and dense interconnection expertise. We look forward to the collaboration and continued success.”
Deutsche Bank acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Web Werks on the fund raise. Khaitan & Co and EY acted as the exclusive advisors to Web Werks respectively.
Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas and PWC India acted as advisors to Iron Mountain on this transaction. JLL acted as an introducing partner to both parties.
