Colt Sizing Up MarketPrizm, a Trend in the Making?

It’s quite a morning for pan-European alternative backbones, eh?  According to the Financial Times, Colt Group (LON:COLT, news) is working on a deal for MarketPrizm, a division of ChiX-Global which specializes in managed communications and IT for the financial trading vertical.  They are said to be trying to get it done so as to announce it with their year-end earnings release later this week.  Colt is, as one would expect, not commenting – yet the rumor seems quite plausible.

Colt has been active in the low latency submarket and has been making a move on the overall managed services and cloud space, so making a direct move on the financial network managed services seems like a natural followup.  So natural, in fact, that I wonder if it might be just the first of a string of deals of this type.  There are other service providers with a tight focus on the financial vertical that could easily draw similar interest on this side of the Atlantic.

That could mean companies like IPC Systems could become targets of larger network operators, in parallel with the current interest in cloud computing and their underlying datacenter infrastructure.  After all, network infrastructure is a critical piece of the cloud puzzle, especially amongst traders.

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Categories: Low Latency · Mergers and Acquisitions