Cancom SE provides IT infrastructure, consulting and cloud-based services to commercial customers both at home in Germany and around the world. Its forte is in the home shopping sector where it has more than two decades of experience, but clients come from all sectors and industries and include SMEs as well as larger organisations.
Cancom offers an enormous range of services, from managing client data centres to providing managed hosting and their popular Business Cloud. Thats a private business cloud that offers businesses and their employees a completely virtual workspace, accessible from anywhere, at any time over almost any device.
Cancom also offers a data centre design and build service. This service is based on a broad range of in-house experience and third party partnerships and covers the entire project from initial concept to finished project. Cancom can also build smaller-scale solutions within client premises and additionally offers external data centre space through its partner network.
For clients looking for temporary or scalable data centre facilities, Cancom offers the innovative mobile data centre. This is a specially-constructed container that houses the full infrastructure, including fire prevention system, UPS and cooling technologies. The containers can be scaled up or down, built to ISO security standards or not depending upon budget and need, and are both modular and mobile. The mobile data centres offer similar redundancy and security measures to a fixed data centre.
Location
Cancom SE is headquartered in Munich, Germany and employs more than 2,700 people Europe-wide. It operates in 30 locations across Germany, Belgium and Austria, and has recently added a subsidiary in North America.
Energy
As well as incorporating energy saving technologies into the data centres they design for clients, Cancom also offers an Energy Efficiency Analysis service to identify areas where clients can cut energy usage and costs. In data centre design, cold air containment and free-air cooling are used where possible.
Although Cancom does not own and operate its own network of data centres, acquisition Pironet does. In 2013 Pironet won the German Data Centre Prize for Energy Saving Measures, predominantly for the huge savings made when it virtualised the server environment.
Funding/business model
Cancom is a German public company and has been listed on the German TecDAX since 1999. The company has expanded rapidly, mostly thorough acquisition. The company is reporting healthy profits, with a 2014 adjusted EBITDA of EUR 54.6 million on a turnover of EUR 828.9 million. The EBITDA has increased almost three-fold on 2010, whilst turnover has not quite doubled. Preliminary figures show a 15% increase in EBITDA in Q1 2015.
Structurally, Cancom is divided into two main business areas ecommerce and IT solutions. The IT solutions arm includes Cancom IT Solutions GmbH, Cancom NSG GmbH, Pironet NDH, Cancom NSG GIS GmbH and cloud solutions provider Acentrix GmbH.
Recent strategic acquisitions include Datensysteme, Pironet and US based private business cloud supplier HPM Networks, allowing Cancom to enter the burgeoning US SME cloud market.
Customers and partners
Cancoms dedication to providing the right solutions, regardless of vendor, is evident through their partnerships network. Initially authorised by Apple back in the early nineties, Cancom is now partnered with all of the big (and small) IT names, including Microsoft, IBM, CISCO, Hewlett Packard, Adobe, VMWare, SAP, Citrix and many more.
Recent customers of Cancom include recent Heidelberger Leben Group and Christoffel-Blindenmission Deutschland (CBM).
A fast growing company looking to dominate the European cloud market
Cancom is heavily focused on its data centre consultancy services and private business cloud provision. It sees the business cloud as the main area for growth and will focus energies on developing this business area using its proprietary software, AHP. Cancom services are predominantly aimed at the mid-size, non-mission critical market and are particularly popular amongst small and medium German businesses that traditionally prefer home grown technology companies.
Cancom does not own its own data centres but historically rents space from third-party provider M-Net in Munich to meet managed hosting needs. The recent acquisition of Pironet has brought some much needed data centre space in house and this is being used to provide large-scale managed hosting solutions for bigger clients. This will be a big draw to companies that liked Cancoms expertise but were reluctant to rely on third-party data security and uptime.