Enterprise Data commits $350m to data centres

Enterprise Data Corporation has revealed it plans to spend $350 million on expanding its Melbourne data centre and building a second Sydney facility in the city's north-west.

Chief executive Jude Jacobs told iTnews that the company had secured funding and development approval for both sites.

The expansion of the company's 6,000 square metre Mitcham data centre near Melbourne would see the original building extended and additional floors added.

The new space in Melbourne was expected to be available before the end of the year.

Enterprise Data Corporation, meanwhile, had acquired an 18,000 square metre parcel of land in Sydney on which it planned to build a new data centre.

Jacobs said the company's original 6,000 square metre Sydney data centre had "insufficient land" to support any further expansion, necessitating the construction of a second facility for the city on a new site.

The new Sydney data centre was expected to come online around the middle of next year.

When completed, the two centres effectively doubled Enterprise Data's data centre footprint in the two cities from 12,000 to 23,000 square metres.

Those footprints included high-density data centre space, "business resilience" seating for up to 500 people and plant (industrial equipment) space.

Enterprise Data Corporation was last week named as one of three additions to the Federal Government's whole-of-government data centre panel.

The company had put forward its Mitcham facility near Melbourne for inclusion in the prized panel arrangement.

Jacobs said the company was "focused on high-end clients – large institutions, financial and government".

It had also had some success selling end-to-end services to product resellers, which Jacobs said had enabled those resellers to "reinvent themselves as managed services providers".