British data center specialist Infinity SDC has reported a 63 percent increase in profit and a 29 percent increase in revenue for the past financial year. The company was ranked 22nd in the Sunday Times’ Tech Track 100, making it the fastest growing data center operator in the UK.

Stuart Sutton, CEO of Infinity, told Datacenter Dynamics the growth resulted from a strategic shift initiated two years ago. The company, which previously focused on expensive, high-end facilities, decided to broaden its target market - and in 2014, tripled the number of customers under contract.

Infinity is currently building its largest facility  at Here East in Stratford, a site which previously served as the press and broadcasting center for the 2012 Olympic Games.

Smaller fish to fry
Infinity owns and operates five Tier III data centers in and around London. According to CBRE Group, the British capital recorded its highest level of outsourced data center take-up in the third quarter of 2014, three times higher than the total for the second quarter.

Infinity surfed this wave, and its revenue increased from £16.7 million to £21.7 million year-on-year.

“We changed our business strategy about two years ago,” explained Sutton. “We started out as a company that did very low volume, very high value custom build jobs. Large data centers for very discerning clients. That got us access to about 15 percent of the overall colocation market in the UK.

“We morphed our strategy to develop more of a platform-based product. It gave us the opportunity to address the whole colocation market – everything from small retail deals all the way to large wholesale deals. On the back of that, we changed our go-to-market strategy, we significantly increased our sales and marketing capabilities, we productized our offering.

“So what you’re seeing is the results of the strategy working through, and – we’re not in control of the market, obviously – the demand in the market is very strong.”

One of Infinity’s most notable customer wins in 2014 was a five year deal with Janet, the national research and education network. The company designed a 2.25MW data center capable of handling everything from enterprise-grade applications to High Performance Computing workloads in the same hall, to be shared by six of the UK’s top universities.

The design won two DatacenterDynamics awards - for innovation in the mega data center, as well as the best data center blueprint.

Infinity is currently building one of Europe’s largest data centers in East London. Once complete, the 260,000 square feet Stratford campus (pictured below) will offer 18MW of power. It is expected to come online in the first quarter of 2016.

Even without this ambitious project, Sutton says he’s got a very busy year ahead: “I hand over a new facility to a reasonably large customer later this month, another one to a different customer in March, and the next three megawatts of capacity for the Slough site are well under way – we’ll take that into live service in the next two to three months.”