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Best Buy Cloud is Good News for Charlotte Colocation

Members of the Charlotte colocation community were intrigued this morning when word spread that consumer electronics giant Best Buy had purchased Mindshift Technologies.  According to their website, Mindshift Technologies is “one of the largest IT outsourcing and cloud services providers, serving small and mid-size businesses for more than 10 years.”  According to sources, the deal is worth $167 million.  Best Buy is apparently intending to diversify its service offerings and differentiate itself from competitors whose portfolio is mostly electronic devices (Radio Shack) or who are able to provide lower prices in its electronics business (WalMart).

The move by Best Buy brings the concept of IT outsourcing (including managed services, colocation, cloud services, etc.) even further into the mainstream and into the light of understanding.  For years companies have weighed the costs versus the benefits of leveraging a third party provider to safeguard their data against loss; which can be the difference between suffering a temporary disruption of service and going out of business.  Often these services are compared to auto insurance; cars can be driven without insurance, but the consequences of a major crash (both on the highway and with the office technology) without coverage can be catastrophic.  The debate regarding the value of these services should, at the minimum, increase in volume, which will heighten awareness.

Best Buy’s activity also leaves its competitors to ponder their future existence as ever-evolving technology continues to change the faces of well-known brands resulting in varying levels of evolution or extinction.  Recent examples of technology’s impact on well-recognized companies include Lego, the maker of small “bricks” that snap together.  The company has very successfully entered the video game market, and the conversion of IBM from a maker of personal computers to professional consulting and business services is well documented.

Best Buy isn’t the first consumer electronics company to take a giant risk on expanding its offerings.  Beginning in the late 1970’s Radio Shack, which had been mostly focused on servicing ham radio operators and radio and television products, introduced the TRS-80 personal computer (PC) and sales skyrocketed.  Operating issues forced Radio Shack to resign their position in the PC manufacturing market by the mid 1990’s; however, Radio Shack continues to provide consumer electronics including PCs.

With the recent marketing onslaught of “cloud services” by behemoth enterprises, (such as Amazon, Microsoft, Verizon, and Google) the concept of leveraging offsite facilities to protect a company’s data and ensure a high level of business continuity has enjoyed a renewed sense of prioritization to companies who now realize that the affordability of these services makes them worth revisiting.

DC74 data centers provide wholesale data center services to clients who understand the benefits of operating their IT activities from a secure offsite location with reliable infrastructure and flexible solutions.  DC74’s core services include Washington DC, Baltimore, and Charlotte colocation.