US colocation firm Involta has appointed a new CEO, Brett Lindsey. He replaces Jim Buie, who was at the company for six years.
Lindsey is a telecoms executive who previously served as CEO at US fiber provider Everstream, expanding its fiber network from Cleveland across 10 states in the mid-West. He worked closely with Involta in that position.
"I came in at the request of [Involta's owner] Carlyle Group," said Lindsey. "Involta has been an amazing partner to me over the last decade. Together, we've worked with very large enterprise customers to give them a complete solution around their network and colocation and cloud needs."
Involta has focused on customers in the manufacturing, healthcare and financial services industries, and concentrated on providing facilities from 1 to 5MW, in underserved Tier 2 cities.
Lindsey expects this to continue, and expand: "I think the big push for us is to continue to expand into new markets. My belief is we'll identify six to eight new markets where we'll put a flag down and announce that those are specific cities that we want to go after. Some of those will be completely Greenfield and others will be inorganic acquisitions.
Just before the holiday season, Involta announced one such expansion, buying 24 acres of land in Green Bay, Wisconsin with an enterprise data center in situ, occupied by Kimberley Clark.
Involta plans to expand this to a 20MW campus, that can become an overflow for the Chicago hub, where power provisioning can be an issue, said Lindsey: "Green Bay is a really unique situation. When I was at Everstream, we built fiber all around the state of Wisconsin, so you've got a nice connectivity between Green Bay and Chicago. We also plan to connect the Green Bay facility to our Duluth, Minnesota location."
Involta has data centers in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota, Idaho, and Arizona. The company recently announced an expansion of its Tucson, Arizona data center to 1MW, and the launch of two Internet Exchanges in Boise, Idaho, and Tucson, Arizona.
Lindsey left Everstream in February, when DigitalBridge bought its major investor, AMP. In the intervening period, he worked more closely with Snip, an Ohio Internet provider he founded back in 2015, which was sold to Zentro in July.
“Brett envisions Involta's future clearly and has a track record of execution, making him the ideal choice to lead the company,” said Ed Vilandrie, Board of Directors Executive Chairman of Involta and Operating Executive for Carlyle’s Infrastructure Group.
