Zayo Group, a Boulder, Colorado-based telecom provider, has agreed to buy Latisys, colocation and IaaS specialist, for $675m. It is the second-largest acquisition in a $5.3 billion buying binge which has seen Zayo swallow 34 companies since 2007.

Latisys runs eight data centers including Northern Virginia (Ashburn), Chicago (Oak Brook), Denver (pictured below), and Orange County (Irvine). In 2014 it expanded into Europe with a data center in London.  It has about 1,200 medium to large enterprise customers with compute, storage and connectivity services.

All of Latisys’ locations are new markets for Zayo, except Chicago; and each of Latisys’s datacenters are in cities where Zayo owns networks. According to Lightreading the company  said that it has invested more than $150m during the past five years to “extend its hybrid cloud hosting and data center platform to respond to increasing demand for enterprise-grade outsourced IT infrastructure services.”

Tailored cloud
Latisys has become a specialist in tailored, managed cloud and connectivity services and generates $88million in revenues in 2013. It has raised more than $300 million from private equity firms Great Hill Partners and Catalyst Investors  and others.

Zayo owns metro fiber assets in all of Latisys’ markets and is connected to the data center facilities it is acquiring. The acquisition will expand Zayo’s data center portfolio to 45 facilities. The acquisition is  funded by Zayo’s existing debt.