Bournemouth-based data center operator C4L (Connections4London) and London-based IT services provider Selection Services have merged under a new name, CoreTX. Both were acquired earlier this year by Castle Street Investments.

According to Castle Street CEO Andy Ross, the deal was engineered specifically to merge the two mid-market players and develop them as a single publicly listed company.

The combined business is forecast to reach £50 million turnover this year, and Ross plans to increase this to £100 million by 2019.

United we stand

CoreTX logo
The new logo

Before the acquisition C4L operated its own colocation data center in Bournemouth. More importantly, it ran the coreTX dark fiber network that connects more than 100 facilities across the country – the largest independent MPLS network in the UK. In March, the company was acquired by Castle Street for £20 million.

Meanwhile Selection Services offered help with tasks like cloud migration and project management. It was acquired for £34.8 million in the beginning of the year, with part of the money coming from MXC Capital, which took a 24.9 percent stake in Castle Street.

Under the terms of the merger, Andy Ross becomes the CEO of CoreTX while C4L chairman Matt Hawkins and CEO Simon Mewett serve as CTO and COO respectively.

“We’ve now got a business that has got a very strong managed services capability and a strong customer base that are demanding cloud. We’ve bought a business that’s got its own data center but, more importantly, has built a motorway to get to the cloud,” Ross told DatacenterDynamics.

“We can bring those two things together so Selection Services clients have a faster route to get into the cloud, on a very secure, high bandwidth, low latency network. We also have the ability to continue providing that as a platform, to allow the rest of the service providers in the mid-market to use that as a route to take their own customers wherever they want to be, whether that’s managed hosting, private cloud, colocation or public cloud.”

Ross said that CoreTX expects to continue acquiring suitable companies.