Igneo Infrastructure Partners Acquires US Signal

US Signal and Igneo Infrastructure Partners | February 20, 2023 | Read time : 05:00 min

Igneo Infrastructure Partners, a worldwide infrastructure investment manager with assets under management of $16.5 billion, has completed the acquisition of US Signal Company, LLC, a distinguished provider of data center and network solutions.

Partner and co-head of Igneo in North America, Michael Ryder, said, "Igneo enters 2023 with strong momentum. We are excited to add US Signal to our growing portfolio in North America, where we continue to see strong tailwinds in the digital infrastructure sector." He added, "This is our third global investment in the digital sector. Our focus remains on high-quality, mid-market, critical infrastructure businesses like US Signal."

(Source – PR Newswire)

U.S. Signal, headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, offers an array of services including network, data center, cloud hosting, connectivity, data protection, disaster recovery, and colocation to both sizeable national telecommunications carriers and regional enterprise customers. US Signal serves a broad customer base with eight data centers in the upper Midwest and a fiber network spanning 9,500 route miles across nine states.

This acquisition marks Igneo's initial foray into the U.S. telecom sector and the fourth platform asset in North America. In the past four years, Igneo has invested over US$2.0 billion of capital in companies such as Terra-Gen, Rialto Bioenergy, and Patriot Rail.

About US Signal

US Signal offers cutting-edge technology solutions for data centers, cloud services, and managed services that assist businesses in updating their IT operations and adapting to evolving technological and business demands. By leveraging a range of services such as colocation, IT infrastructure, data management, disaster recovery, endpoint monitoring, and security, US Signal can cater to even the most intricate technical requirements. US Signal's comprehensive fiber network powers all of these services, ensuring secure and reliable connectivity. The network is expertly designed to optimize edge computing, enabling private WAN connections and one-hop access to the internet via Tier 1 upstream relationships and direct connections to hyper-scale cloud providers.

About Igneo Infrastructure Partners

Igneo Infrastructure Partners is a globally recognized investment firm that focuses on investing in exceptional mid-market infrastructure companies across various regions, including the UK, Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Being an independent investment team under the First Sentier Investors Group, Igneo has built a robust reputation for partnering with companies and providing value to investors. Since its establishment in 1994, the firm has honed its expertise in identifying promising investment opportunities in the infrastructure space and has consistently delivered exceptional results. The team prides itself on its capability to work closely with portfolio companies, implementing innovative solutions and proactive asset management practices that foster long-term sustainable growth.

Spotlight

How Cloud Security Reduces Threat Risk and Paves the Way to SASE

A cloud-centric workforce requires new ways of tacking security challenges. This eBook explains how a SASE framework can help you secure the cloud and enable resilient protection for your whole network.Secure Access Service Edge architecture unifies varied solutions to extend protection among every device.

More featured news

Spotlight

How Cloud Security Reduces Threat Risk and Paves the Way to SASE

Related News

APPLICATION INFRASTRUCTURE, IT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

Options Announces Achievement of Microsoft Infrastructure Solutions Partner Status

Businesswire | May 12, 2023

Options Technology, the leading provider of cloud-enabled managed services to the global capital markets, today announced its achievement of Microsoft Solutions Partner designation for Infrastructure. Microsoft’s Solutions Partner designation differentiates partners with broad technical capabilities, a dedication to skilling and training, and a proven ability to successfully deliver solutions for customers in a specific Microsoft Cloud solution area. This follows a change in the Microsoft Partner Program, consolidating its previous Gold Competencies to a smaller number of solution partner designations and a broader set of requirements for attainment. The Infrastructure Solutions Partner designation showcases expertise in helping customers accelerate the migration of key infrastructure workloads to Microsoft Azure, architecting cloud environments and managing these environments at scale. Options’ President and CEO, Danny Moore, said, “Over the past 24 months, the team has continued to enhance their expertise and advance our service offering, resulting in over 200 Microsoft certifications and our latest achievement as an official Microsoft Infrastructure Solutions Partner. Microsoft have raised the bar for their technology partners, so this accomplishment is a clear demonstration of the team's commitment to building and expanding our best-of-breed cloud-agnostic solutions and maintaining our position as the number one Microsoft Cloud partner to the Global Capital Markets.” Today’s news comes as the latest in a series of exciting developments for Options, including its partnership with KX, the completion of SOC compliance for a 12th consecutive year and its deployment of OPRA in Frankfurt FR2. In 2019, Options received investment from Boston-based Private Equity Firm Abry Partners. This investment has enabled Options to accelerate its growth strategy and develop its technology platform while expanding its global reach in key financial centres. About Options Options Technology is the No. 1 provider of IT infrastructure to global Capital Markets firms, supporting their operations and ecosystems. Founded in 1993, the firm began life as a hedge fund technology services provider. Today, the company provides high-performance managed trading infrastructure and cloud-enabled managed services to over 550 firms globally, providing an agile, scalable platform in an Investment Bank-grade Cybersecurity wrapper. Options clients include the leading global investment banks, hedge funds, funds of funds, proprietary trading firms, market makers, broker/dealers, private equity houses, and exchanges. With offices in 8 key cities; New York, Toronto, Chicago, London, Belfast, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Auckland, Options are well placed to service its customers on-site and remotely. In 2019, Options secured a significant growth investment from Abry Partners, a Boston-based sector-focused private equity firm. This investment has enabled Options to considerably accelerate its growth strategy to invest further in its technology platform and expand its reach in key financial centres globally. Options has been named among the UK’s leading growth companies in the 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017 Sunday Times HSBC International Track 200 league table. About Abry Partners Abry is one of the most experienced and successful sector-focused private equity investment firms in North America. Since its founding in 1989, the firm has completed over $82 billion of leveraged transactions and other private equity or preferred equity placements. Currently, the firm manages over $5.0 billion of capital across their active funds.

IT SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT

SolarWinds Adds Transformative AI Features to IT Service Management Solutions

Businesswire | May 17, 2023

SolarWinds a leading provider of simple, powerful, secure observability and IT management software, announces it’s adding transformative artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities to its IT service management (ITSM) solutions. The new AI features include a virtual agent to help users solve everyday IT problems and guided incident resolution to empower agents with the information they need to effectively resolve complex issues. The new SolarWinds® Service Desk additions are designed to reduce ticket volume by enabling users to remediate easier-to-solve issues so IT practitioners can focus on the complex issues requiring their expertise. The Service Desk AI virtual agent can answer user questions and support troubleshooting. By constantly learning based on interactions with users, the virtual agent adapts over time to provide the most helpful and relevant information and help solve issues based on each customer's specific needs. The cloud-native SolarWinds Service Desk solution is highly regarded in the industry for being easy to use and effective for users and agents while providing quick time to value. Automated ticket routing, AI-powered smart suggestions, and the new virtual agent within Service Desk all help ensure agents can efficiently deliver services across the organization. Customers can also enhance and personalize Service Desk through integrations with over 200 popular cloud applications. “Digital transformation, application modernization, and the move to the cloud have dramatically increased the complexity of digital services,” said Cullen Childress, GVP of product management at SolarWinds. “This means the number of potential problems impacting user experience has also increased substantially. Our ITSM solutions are a significant focus we’re investing in. This includes Service Desk, which enables teams to focus more on important business priorities rather than mundane, time-consuming tasks. By leveraging advanced AI and powerful automation, SolarWinds makes users more productive, supports agents more efficiently, and helps ensure companies are more successful.” SolarWinds solutions are rooted in the company’s deep connection with tech professionals. The company engaged directly with customers through THWACK®, its community of over 180,000 users, to develop and test the new AI capabilities and ensure they make it easier for IT pros to do their jobs. A recent survey of SolarWinds customers found the new Service Desk AI features enabled IT teams to reduce ticket resolution time by 24% and save an average of 23 hours per week. Surveyed Service Desk customers have also reported a reduction in downtime of 21% on average and a 24% average increase in progress toward achieving service-level agreements (SLAs). Teams can customize SolarWinds Service Desk to provide an efficient and intelligent ticket management system and service request workflows for other business groups beyond the IT department. This enables human resources, legal, finance, sales, marketing, and other departments to become more responsive and enhance their service delivery capabilities. Managing employee requests through one system and automating workflows helps these departments deliver better and faster services to colleagues. Later this year, SolarWinds is planning to launch a new enterprise service management (ESM) solution designed to allow multiple departments within a single organization to have their own service portal, ticket management system, and service catalog within one platform to allow better cross-department workflows while ensuring data from different departments is appropriately segregated. The new AI-powered ITSM upgrades are the latest significant solution enhancements from SolarWinds. SolarWinds released cloud-based and hybrid observability solutions and a new partner program in the past year. By investing in the AI-powered SolarWinds Platform, the company is blending observability and service management to consistently deliver simple and secure solutions for IT Ops, DevOps, SecOps, and CloudOps professionals. About SolarWinds SolarWinds is a leading provider of simple, powerful, secure observability and IT management software built to enable customers to accelerate their digital transformation. Our solutions provide organizations worldwide—regardless of type, size, or complexity with a comprehensive and unified view of today’s modern, distributed, and hybrid network environments. We continuously engage with IT service and operations professionals, DevOps and SecOps professionals, and database administrators (DBAs) to understand the challenges they face in maintaining high-performing and highly available hybrid IT infrastructures, applications, and environments. The insights we gain from them, in places like our THWACK community, allow us to address customers’ needs now and in the future. Our focus on the user and our commitment to excellence in end-to-end hybrid IT management have established SolarWinds as a worldwide leader in solutions for observability, IT service management, application performance, and database management.

APPLICATION INFRASTRUCTURE

Cloudflare Announces Partnership with Kyndryl to Deliver Managed Network Transformation Services for Enterprises

Businesswire | May 09, 2023

Cloudflare, Inc. the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, announced its partnership with Kyndryl Holdings, Inc. the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, to help enterprises modernize and scale their corporate networks with managed WAN-as-a-Service and Cloudflare Zero Trust. The partnership couples Kyndryl’s expert managed end-to-end networking services with Cloudflare’s robust technology platform to enable enterprises to streamline connectivity to multiple clouds at scale. The demands of modern applications, data, services, and connect-from-anywhere workloads are of top importance for businesses, including enterprises with legacy network infrastructure. Yet, organizations are increasingly faced with patchworks of data overload, on-premise technologies, public cloud services, and outdated networks, all of which contribute to operational loss and security risks. Kyndryl’s expertise in network services and protecting business-critical infrastructure, coupled with Cloudflare’s global cloud platform, presents a partnership that enables enterprises to leverage a fully managed Internet security, performance, and reliability solution. The partnership allows enterprises to quickly scale network capacity based on business needs while reducing costs and presenting cost predictability. “We have witnessed how enterprises are grappling with legacy hardware while introducing more and more cloud-based applications. As time goes on, this is only holding back business, limiting innovation potential, and increasing network security risk," said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. "That's why with Kyndryl we've made it seamless for enterprises to be guided through the entire transition of bringing their corporate networks to the cloud.” "As Cloudflare continues to expand on its end-to-end cloud solution, we turn to our partners to help deliver this full set of services at an even greater scale to our customers. Given Kyndryl’s industry-leading consulting and managed network services, there was a clear opportunity to partner in order to guide enterprises through their network transformations," said Matt Harrell, Global Head of Channels and Alliances at Cloudflare. "By bringing together Kyndryl’s proven track record with enterprises in managing solutions, and Cloudflare's platform for delivering leading comprehensive cloud infrastructure, this combination creates what enterprises need to easily transform their network." With the growing complexity of multi-cloud networking, Cloudflare and Kyndryl’s managed WAN-as-a-service allows organizations to convert all their resources to cloud-native solutions and retire expensive traditional hardware with confidence. Furthermore, the end-to-end network transformation services will deliver the industry’s most complete, Cloudflare Zero Trust security, and connectivity with remote access to enable organizations with centralized management, control, and visibility to their network infrastructure. “Through Kyndryl’s collaboration with Cloudflare, we are excited to help guide more customers through their network modernization journeys,” Josh Helm, VP of Global Network & Edge Offering Enablement at Kyndryl. “As organizations grapple with increasing network workload demands, the joint WAN-as-a-Service offering will enable enterprises to build a robust cloud network and focus on being agile and innovative. The expansive IT advisory services Kyndryl provides, combining cloud networking with network security, simply helps organizations to overcome technological barriers for a seamless digital transformation.” Cloudflare and Kyndryl are focused on helping customers Streamline multi-cloud and direct to Internet strategy and transition networks in confidence: Enterprises have moved data to the cloud and use SaaS applications, but are leveraging hardware as their network. Cloudflare and Kyndryl have teamed up to deliver network services to the enterprise market. Cloudflare is the technology platform and Kyndryl is the services provider that will shepherd customers through this journey. Reduce spend on private network links and appliances while saving IT teams from manual work: Provide enterprises with leading networking and edge security capabilities needed for flexible work environments, including reducing tech debt and legacy architecture. Kyndryl will advise and assist enterprises in managing their IT infrastructure as they evolve their networks and transfer workloads into Cloudflare’s platform. Accelerate digital maturity and network modernization: Flexible cloud networking expertise with managed WAN-as-a-Service enables networks to respond to evolving IT needs, equipped for today’s needs and automatically for what’s ahead. Extend network security to offices and data centers by replacing traditional WAN: Complete enterprise cybersecurity tackles risks and attacks from every location and vector. About Cloudflare Cloudflare, Inc. is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare’s suite of products protect and accelerate any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was awarded by Reuters Events for Global Responsible Business in 2020, named to Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in 2021, and ranked among Newsweek's Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces in 2022.