Baton Rouge-based Venyu, which provides cloud-based data solutions from its facilities in the Bon Carré Business Center on Florida Boulevard and in Bossier City, is branching out into a new service line—designing and building data centers for other entities both locally and outside of the market.
With a growing number of companies increasingly reliant on cloud storage and data center solutions, Venyu executives say, there is a growing demand for a variety of data storage options.
“There are large organizations that might warrant having a facility all to themselves,” says Tom Curb, Venyu executive vice president of business development and legal affairs. “Maybe they’re in a highly secure industry and want their own facility, so we could design and build it for them.”
Venyu also is marketing its design and build services to data center companies like itself in other markets.
“If someone out of our region wants to get into the data center business and diversify their current revenue stream we would work with them to design and build a facility,” Curb says, adding the company is currently in talks with several potential clients.
The move into the new service line makes sense for Venyu, according to Curb, who says the company is something of a self-schooled expert in designing and building data storage facilities. Venyu is currently building a new facility of its own in a renovated historic building in downtown Shreveport—a 40,000 square foot data center that costs an estimated $20 million and will replace the company’s existing data center in Bossier City, which it has outgrown.
In working on the Shreveport project, Venyu executives realized they had expertise they could market to others.
“We started building this last summer and realized we had a level of know-how and could provide that service to others,” he says.
Designing and building a top-of-the-line data center is capital intensive. On the low end, such facilities are in the $12 million to $15 million range. On the upper end, Curb says, they can cost in the “hundreds of millions of dollars.” Nonetheless, demand for such facilities continues to grow, he says.
“There are a fair number of companies and organizations that are in this space,” he says. “But the data center segment itself, whether you want to look at it wholesale or retail, is still experiencing double digit growth year over year.”
Venyu, which was founded in 1989, was acquired in 2013 by EATEL for an undisclosed amount and is operated as a wholly owned subsidiary of the telecommunications company.
—Stephanie Riegel
